The Doorstop
by Iaculus
Summary: The best laid schemes o' gods an' men gang aft agley... Eva/40K/Nanoha/Haruhi and many more. Mega crossover created as a stand-alone sequel to/AU of Academia Nut's Thousand Shinji and Open Door respectively. Reading those two first not mandatory.
1. Prologue

**Author's Notes: **Perhaps some backstory to start with. As this thing's summary mentions, it was inspired by the works of this site's esteemed Academia Nut - particularly and especially his behemothic crossover, _The Open Door_. See, after reading that for a while, I started getting less than happy about the actions of some of the characters and where the story was going, so in my infinite wisdom, I decided to write my own version (a gigantic crossover piece as my first solo work of fanfiction - no problem, right?), and this little fellow is the result. Rest assured, it's not a straight-up hate-fic, more a reinterpretation that goes to some very strange places indeed, and if the author of the original piece objects, I will happily take it down.

So without further ado, I present the first five chapters of this turkey plus the prologue, bringing us up to the point where things start to seriously deviate from the original plotline. Though, as mentioned, you do not have to read _The Open Door_ to enjoy this (few of my beta readers did, that's for sure), those who have will likely notice a few differences in events before then. Some are plot-relevant later on, others are just because I don't like slavishly copying the work of others. I'll leave you to discover which is which (insert diabolical laughter here). From then onwards, updates will be once per week.

As per normal, none of the series or franchises involved belong to me, and this is not intended to profit from them without their consent. Enjoy!

* * *

**Prologue**

The pedestrian tunnel was poorly lit, a state of affairs only exacerbated by the dull, rainy sky outside. Nevertheless, sufficient illumination remained to distinguish three humanoid figures a short way inside the entrance, all dressed in heavy rain-gear. They spoke amongst themselves, the oppressive weather drowning out their words – not that their sole witness, a half-asleep and very damp pigeon on the fence outside, would have been able to understand them anyway.

Tiny though its avian brain was, even it could recognise that the beings inside the tunnel were rather unusual – indeed, two of them, despite their appearance, were very obviously _not_ human, and it wasn't all that sure about the third, either. It did not pause to consider whether or not all of _them_ knew this, though, seeing as the gnawing emptiness in its stomach was a rather more pressing concern.

Eventually, two of the figures walked back out, their features becoming more apparent as they stepped back into the grey morning light. Both were young (or, at least, had the _appearance_ of youth), but that was all they had in common. One was a male of slightly above-average height whose floppy brown hair was plastered to his scalp by the rain and whose aura of world-weary lethargy projected some distance from his actual body. The other was immaculate by contrast, a diminutive, expressionless female who appeared quite unaffected by the weather. Her hair was the same lavender-grey as the pigeon's feathers, a most unusual hue for a human, and appeared, from the bird's limited perspective, to be completely dry.

The remaining figure stayed where he was until sometime after they left, before retreating noiselessly into the shadows, which embraced him as if he were an old friend. By that point, though, the pigeon had left to examine a discarded bento box, and saw none of it. Indeed, what it _had_ seen was swiftly forgotten – barely-digestible detritus, as ever, proved far more interesting than first contact with extradimensional life.

* * *

The star system had once been home to a prosperous trading world, a commercial hub for its entire subsector. Ships from tens of light-years away had voyaged to and from its massive orbital docks, flooding its markets with exotic goods and its citizens' pockets with abundant wealth.

Now, though, it was a graveyard. The once-bustling docks were silent, their twisted, ruptured metal guts spilling out into the void and the mangled saucer-hulls of wrecked defence craft lazily orbiting them like flies around a corpse. Through it all glided the vessel responsible for the carnage, otherworldly energies dancing across its cathedral-like form. The last of the prisoners had been brought on board hours earlier, time enough for the lengthy explanation of how their lives would be from now on and why they deserved every little bit of it. There weren't many of them left, which simplified matters a great deal.

At last, only one task remained.

The enormous spacecraft approached the battle-scarred planet, its shields sparkling as they shunted away debris from the fight. It came to a halt just outside the outermost limits of the atmosphere, retro-thrusters puffing away gamely, and hung there a moment as if to admire the view.

A dorsal laser swivelled into position and opened fire. Though the beam itself was invisible, its sheer intensity created a pillar of flame as the oxygen it interacted with spontaneously combusted. The turret swept back and forth, inscribing a message in the landscape that just happened to occupy the same space as the ruins of the planetary capital. It was short and crude, as much a threat as an announcement, as much a challenge as a boast.

Aboard the bridge, the captain watched, her eyes ablaze with flickering hellfire. She held a small, numbered cube in one clawed hand, which she tossed idly up and down as she observed the weapon's handiwork.

A flick of her wrist, and the die skittered across her command desk, attracting the attention of all crew present. A broad, toothy grin spread across her face, and she theatrically glanced down at its result.

"Right then," she said. "Who's next?"

* * *

Across the multiverse, strange events began to crop up with increasing regularity. A fortress-city with a world-shaking secret at its heart lay at the mercy of incomprehensible invaders, only to receive aid from a most unexpected direction. A sleepy Californian town was shaken to its core when one of the occasional skirmishes amongst its supernatural community turned into something much, much worse. A fanatical theocracy's display of power went horribly wrong, creating something new and terrible whose birth-cries echoed across time and space...

... And far, far away, four beings that had once been human and now were considerably more watched their children's progress with hungry anticipation. They had millions of new worlds to explore and trillions of new souls to bend to their will, and were ready to seize the opportunity with both hands and whatever other appendages they could muster.

It was both unfortunate and wholly predictable, therefore, that there was something of a spanner in the works. Several, in fact.


	2. Meet the Neighbours

**1. Meet the Neighbours**

The brown-haired teenager stared out of the classroom window, pensively tapping his forehead with his index finger as the teacher droned away in the background. The subject was history, or perhaps geography – the elderly woman's spiel was so vague and uninformative that she might as well have been a figment of his imagination for all the educational benefit she was providing. Odds were that she was a figment of _someone's_, anyway.

Several days had passed since his encounter with the emissary from another dimension, and Kyon was still wondering if he had indeed made the right decision in granting them passage. The thing was, he hadn't been entirely honest when he had said that they had no way of stopping said emissary's masters. He did indeed have several options for doing just that, but was rather reluctant to use any of them given that (a) he wasn't in the habit of starting interstellar wars with people he'd only just met, and (b) several of those options could quite likely result in the destruction of the universe. Again. Weighty concerns for a high-school student, but after a while in the SOS Brigade, you got used to them.

Nagato's contributions to the situation had been particularly disheartening – the Integrated Data Entity had been tracking the movement of heavily-armed warships quite in excess of what was likely required for the 'exploration' the emissary had mentioned, and when he had asked her for some sort of explanation as to what exactly their visitors were after their initial meeting with them, she had handed him an H.P. Lovecraft anthology and said, in her usual deadpan monotone, "Like that – but worse."

He was pretty sure she wasn't talking about the purple prose and howling racism, either.

As if on cue, North High School's own resident cosmic horror stuck her head over his shoulder and gave him a bright, cheerful smile. "Hey, Kyon! What're you drawing? Can I see?"

Kyon looked down and realised, with a ghastly sense of impending dread, that he had been idly sketching out the name the emissary had given him. He'd tried to forget it – the last thing he wanted to do was summon those... things, whatever they were, but it had kept creeping back like that oddly squidgy burger that you'd downed a bit too fast, fervently hoping that the green bits were some sort of herb. Desperately, he tried to tug the sheet of paper out of sight, but Haruhi was far too fast.

"Aww, c'mon. Why so secretive? It's just some writing, for crying out loud. Wait – what is that? Zinchy... Zeen-chee... Tzintchi..."

"Oh, it's just the username of a guy on a forum I visit," Kyon replied airily. "Potato farming – my family's looking to start a vegetable garden, you see. So, you hear about that newspaper contest?"

"Newspaper contest?" Haruhi's eyes lit up. Appealing to her competitive streak was always a safe bet.

"Umm... yes." Kyon scrambled for ideas. _Damn it, Koizumi, where are you? This is supposed to be your job._ "They wanted people to send in pictures of interesting and unusual things happening in their neighbourhood. Winners would get a cash prize and their photos printed in the paper. I thought you'd heard about it, to be honest."

"What? Of _course_ I didn't! It's your duty as a loyal member of the SOS Brigade to keep me informed of these things! Honestly, why do I have to deal with such incompetent underlings? Come on, Kyon – we're going to show the world our photographic expertise!"

That was the nice thing about dealing with Haruhi, Kyon thought as he was dragged out of the room by his elbow, the teacher's ineffectual protests ringing in his ears. Even if the distraction you came up with was entirely fabricated, you could be fairly sure it would exist by the time you got to it. Normally the idea of a Suzumiya-coordinated photo op would fill him with quiet dread, but it was infinitely better than tentacular horribleness creeping out from the walls or whatever.

_I mean, that can't possibly have counted. She didn't even _pronounce _it properly the first couple of times. I've got nothing to worry about. Right?_

That evening, once he had finally staggered back home, he got his answer.

* * *

The invite was majestic in its simplicity – a gold-embossed card bearing the logo of one of the most punitively expensive hotels in town and adorned with a few brief lines of extravagantly-flowing script.

_Main Lounge_

_5:30 p.m._

_Your fellow potato enthusiast, Tzintchi_

Kyon couldn't resist having another glance at it as he approached the hotel's main entrance. It wasn't every day that he got to handle something quite so forebodingly _expensive_, after all.

A quick chat with Nagato had provided him with some typically efficient (if curt) directions, and once school had finished he had made a quick stop by the bathrooms to wash his face and comb his hair, before setting out to meet his enigmatic hosts.

The lobby was as spectacular as he had expected – a carefully-designed riot of rare woods, intricate carpeting, and tastefully-applied gilt. He stood around in it for a moment, feeling deeply awkward, before one of the immaculately-dressed porters bustled up to him.

"Ah, hello, Master Kyon. Your friend Master Shinji said to expect you. Please follow me."

_Shinji? Ah, right, Tzintchi. Imaginative alias, there._

Nodding his thanks in what he hoped was an appropriately dignified manner, Kyon did so. He briefly wondered how the man had recognised him on sight, but dismissed it as a simple demonstration of the service the hotel's patrons paid for. After all, it wasn't as if they likely had that many North High School students wandering through their doors.

The porter stopped at the door to the lounge, held it open, and gestured for him to go through. The room beyond was a warm, low-ceilinged place whose aura of homeliness would have been rather more convincing if its array of armchairs, sofas, and coffee tables had not been entirely uninhabited apart from the four beings slouching casually in the centre.

There was something... _off_ about them, Kyon saw as he walked towards them. They were human, yet not, standing out against the background of the room like bad special effects. One wore the appearance of an attractive, dark-haired woman in her late twenties, squeezed into a deep purple dress that was practically sin incarnate. Another was a quiet, reserved-looking girl who looked like Nagato's more personable older sister. The third was another teenage girl, this time an inhumanly confident-looking redhead in a bright scarlet gown that subtly warred with that of the older woman for the title of 'Most Likely To Make Kyon Swallow His Own Tongue'. The last was the only male of the group, a short, thoughtful-looking young man in a deep blue dinner jacket who looked vaguely lawyerly to Kyon's inexperienced eye, and who looked up and gave him a friendly wave as he approached.

"Afternoon, Kyon. How's it going?"

"You'd be Tzintchi, right?"

"Please, call me Shinji. Or Mr. Ikari, if you want to be formal. It used to be my name, after all, when I was human."

"Ah? So how did you get the extra consonants?" Mocking the eldritch abomination was, of course, the _smart_ thing to do.

"By being able to do things like _this_."

The besuited apparition made a complicated hand gesture, and a not-unpleasant but otherwise indescribable sensation washed across Kyon's body. He looked down, and saw that his school uniform had been replaced by immaculately-tailored black tie garb. A couple of seconds passed, and then his neatly-folded uniform appeared in front of his eyes with a loud pop, before falling into his outstretched arms.

Tzintchi grinned. "Like it? It's yours now. Borrowed the design from a little place in London I visited once back home. Can't have the staff giving you the stink-eye because you're violating their dress-code, can we?"

Kyon tried desperately to regain control of the situation. "Um... thanks. And your friends are...?"

"Oh, sorry, we should have said, shouldn't we? Ladies?"

"Misato Katsuragi. Pleased to meet you," said the dark-haired woman in a voice that made the wonderful new suit suddenly feel uncomfortably tight.

"Rei Ayanami," stated the blue-haired girl flatly, with an odd bubbling undertone that made him wonder about her health.

"Asuka Langley Soryuu," the redhead announced with unassailable smugness. "So, Shinji, this is the guy? Doesn't look like much."

_Temper, Kyon..._ He forced an awkward smile. "Nice to meet you, everyone. So, may I ask why you wanted to pay me a visit?"

The redhead, Asuka, raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me? It was _you_ who summoned _us_."

Kyon sighed and pinched his nose. "Right. Which is why you used a summoning-word that wormed into the recipient's head and didn't even need to be pronounced properly. And why you all turned up at once rather than just Mr. Ikari. And why the invite you sent me referred to something that happened at about the same time as the summoning, implying prior observation. I'm not an idiot, you know."

Ikari chuckled genially. "All right, you caught us. Mostly, we just wanted to meet the neighbours, see if you had any questions that needed asking. You know, being good interdimensional citizens."

_And if that's the truth, then I'm a teacup._ "I... see. Actually, I did have one question. You've been sending through a lot of military vessels lately. Why is that?"

"Oh, it's quite simple, really," Shinji replied. "We want to safeguard our own interests. Do you know how many people are still alive on our world, excluding daemons?"

"Wait – _daemons_?"

"It's a bit snappier than 'sentient psychic constructs', don't you think? Anyway, our current population is two billion – and yes, we do indeed come from a parallel Earth. In the past eighteen years, we have managed to rise from a low point of nine hundred and fifty million through careful social management after a group of scared, greedy old men nearly ended up killing _everyone_. The only way we were able to prevent it was by hijacking the process to fuel our own apotheosis."

"And fifteen years before _that_," Misato interjected, "half the human race – three billion people – died in a disaster that shattered the world. Same people responsible."

"Indeed so. You will understand, therefore, Kyon, that we have _no_ intention of allowing another catastrophe of that magnitude to befall us. Our policy is to act on our own terms – firmly, decisively, and with overwhelming force. We understand that you are likewise. That business with the Integrated Data Entity a while ago impressed us greatly."

All four politely applauded him with eerie unison.

"That's one of the reasons we want to help you," Misato explained. "So far, you've been doing pretty well when it comes to keeping Haruhi occupied, but how long can you keep it up? How long can you hold the fate of the universe in your hands?"

Kyon said nothing.

"Let me tell you a little story. A long time ago, in a place far from here, there was a race called the Eldar. They ruled their galaxy without question. Their fleets were invincible, their civilisation unassailable, and their scientific achievements unmatched. Every planet was a paradise, every citizen a model of aesthetic and intellectual perfection. Of course, it couldn't last. It wasn't political strife or an external threat that did them in, though. They were beyond that. It was _boredom_. The myriad wonders of thousands of star systems were at their very fingertips, and it still wasn't enough. They experimented with ancient rites and forbidden pleasures. Blood flowed in the streets, and the empire slowly tore itself apart. Some saw their doom approaching and escaped, but most remained, only realising their mistake as their race died in darkness and fire, its final agonised, ecstatic screams giving birth to a new and terrible god."

She rose from her chair and sashayed towards him.

"Do you understand me? You can't do this forever. People change. It's how they are. Will Haruhi always be satisfied with her cosy little prison of a high school? Will _you_? Sooner or later, she will demand something you are unable or unwilling to give her. It needn't even be something particularly big. She once nearly destroyed the world over a _baseball game_ without noticing, remember? It will happen, though, and everything – your friends, your family, your home – will be gone."

She was standing in front of him now. Her voice had dropped to a husky whisper, and he could faintly detect the scent of unnamed, exotic spices. He clutched his uniform in front of him like a protective blanket.

"We can help you, Kyon. We have power at our disposal, and the willingness to use it. Having your universe destroyed won't benefit us either, after all. We can make your life easier; buy you a few more years of existence..."

She smiled seductively, and plucked a hair from his head.

"And we can teach you how to fuck three girls up the ass at the same time and blow their minds."

Kyon's expression froze. "This conversation is _over_."

He turned and walked out of the room. As the door closed behind him, he heard Shinji's voce.

"Just remember – if you ever change your mind, give us a call. We'll be waiting."

* * *

Once he left, the four young gods turned to each other.

"Did you get it?" Tzintchi asked.

Mislaato smiled and showed them the short brown hair in her hand. "Could you ever doubt me?"

Asukhon peered at it dubiously. "You think this'll be enough? I mean, given that he's... you know."

Their leader grinned and stretched his arms out behind his head, not noticing as they passed through the chair he was supposed to be seated on.

"With Chaos, all things are possible," he said confidently. "Think of it as a Plan B."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** So why, you ask, did they want his hair? What happened to the Evangelion cast? Not to put too fine a point on it, _what the hell is going on_? I can only reply: Patience, my friends. All shall be revealed in time. Honest.


	3. First Day at the Office

**2. First Day at the Office**

Quartermaster Sergeant Frederick Jones strolled along the endless grey corridors of the Time-Space Administration Bureau central office, the people walking past and the ever-shifting green-and-purple miasma outside the windows providing the only splashes of colour. He checked his battered old watch again, relieved to note that they still had twenty minutes until their appointment.

'They', in this case, were him and his old friend and superior officer Quartermaster Gunther Krebs, who nodded to him with typical curtness.

"Brief me."

Gunther was a logistical genius, processing and allocating resources with stoic professionalism, clinical efficiency, and mathematical impartiality. When coupled with his nigh-obsessive standards of cleanliness and frankly lousy aim with an Intelligent Device, his rapid promotion to his current rank had been something of a foregone conclusion, as had been his complete lack of upwards mobility ever since. Gunther didn't mind, though – he'd found his place in the universe.

Fred, on the other hand, was his natural compliment. A second-generation immigrant to Mid-Childa whose family had originated in a small and unregarded part of Earth called Wales, he was blessed with the sort of big, friendly smile that made people want to spill out their life stories to him, ravenous curiosity, and a near-unrivalled talent for office politics. The end result was someone with connections all over the Bureau and information-gathering skills that put some intelligence agents to shame, which almost made up for his general incompetence regarding his actual _job_.

Not knowing what to do with him, his superiors had aimlessly shuffled him around for a few years before placing him under Gunther, and the two had managed to hit it off famously despite their wildly disparate personalities. They made a formidable team – Fred would keep his boss informed on the latest gossip and office rumours as well as ensuring that he got the supplies he needed, while Gunther would just... well... be Gunther. Though he would never sneeze at a shot at promotion, Fred was content. The pay was enough to keep his family well-maintained and his daughter into a good school, and the little perks they picked up on the side for their work were nice.

"The outfit's called the First Military Expeditionary Force," he began. "Only recently-founded, and pretty small, but they've been hiring talent and lots of it. C.O. is Colonel Hayate Yagami. Early twenties, SS+-ranked mage, recruited after the Book of Darkness Incident and been climbing the ranks like someone strapped a rocket to her tail ever since. Other personnel are from all over the place – Interstellar Navigation Bureau, Disaster Planning, even some clerk from the Infinite Library. Boss, I don't even want to _contemplate_ how contorted the chain of command's going to get. Two common factors, though. First, they tend to be young hotshots with lots of magical power and odds on promotion ranging from 'good' to 'spectacular', just like their boss. Second, most of them were either part of or connected to something called 'Riot Force Six' three years back. Supposedly an artefact-retrieval group, but _way_ overgunned, and involved in some pretty highly-classified stuff. I hear they had something to do with the Scaglietti Incident – you remember that huge ship that got blasted to bits by the fleet?"

Gunther nodded.

"Right. Anyway, what I _know_ is that they got disbanded shortly afterwards and went their separate ways. Tactical training, yadda yadda, cyborg zombies, yadda yadda, environmental protection, yadda yadda. Now they're back together, they've been hiring, and we got headhunted. End of story."

"Cyborg... zombies?"

"You heard me."

There was a brief pause.

"Equipment?"

That was the other thing about Gunther. The man was near-pathologically averse to using any more than the bare minimum of words needed to convey his meaning, and sometimes even balked at _that_ much. Fred always felt as if he had to fill in for both sides of the conversation.

"One Prion-class heavy frigate, the_ Eventide_, fresh off the production lines. Fast, quiet, _very_ heavily-armed for its size – it's even packing an Arc-en-ciel. Long-range patrol vessel for the sorts of places you don't want to send long-ranged patrols into, basically."

"Good ship," Gunther commented, his gaunt, lined face creasing into an approving smile.

"Most of the other equipment requests are classified, but I had a chat to one of the folks in the loading bays, and they've got a year's worth of food supplies on board. That's some pretty deep exploration."

"Another cover-up?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the labcoats in DSS found something _bad_ out there. We'll find out when we get to it, I guess." He glanced at the sign above their heads. "Ah, here we are."

The door slid open obligingly. Inside was the sort of chaos that inevitably occurs when a lot of people try to do a lot of things in very little time. A short, blue-haired girl was desperately trying to stuff a bewildering array of apparel into a tiny suitcase whilst being berated by a clearly exasperated redhead, someone else's Barrier Jacket kept switching on and off at random intervals, a can of meat had spilled across the floor for no readily-apparent reason, and two large dogs were picking their way daintily through the whole melee with military-issue backpacks clutched in their mouths.

"May I help you?" a voice from behind them asked.

Fred turned around with a start. The speaker was a tall, stern-faced woman with pink hair and oddly-shaped eyes who had a tiny winged humanoid sat on her shoulder dressed in a miniature version of the brown TSAB uniform. Despite all this, she managed to look like a veritable bastion of sanity compared to the mayhem around them.

"Umm... yes please. We're looking for Colonel Yagami, Captain...?"

"Signum," the woman replied. "Mistress Hayate is in her office. I will take you to her."

_'Mistress Hayate'? Oh, right, must be one of those bodyguards Yagami's supposed to have. Scary lady._

"And you are?" Captain Signum asked as they carefully skirted around the meat spillage.

"Quartermaster Sergeant Jones and Quartermaster Krebs."

She inclined her head to indicate Gunther. "Does he speak?"

Gunther grinned. "Sometimes."

Her face betrayed the faintest flicker of a smile.

Colonel Yagami's office was a welcome haven of tranquillity. Three young women were sat on the desk, chatting idly to each other, while another of the little familiars swooped around behind them, busily sorting paperwork.

Hayate Yagami.

Fate Testarossa-Harlaown.

Nanoha Takamachi.

It wasn't every day that you got to meet three of the Bureau's most powerful combat mages at once.

Fred had mixed feelings about the newest wave of recruits. On the one hand, he couldn't help but dislike the fact that they were effectively hiring child soldiers, some of them younger than his own daughter. On the other hand, he felt a disproportionate, almost paternal amount of pride for those brave boys and girls who had managed to pass through their trial by fire.

These three had done that and much, much more. They were legends, an inspiration to their peers and the subject of more stories than soldiers twice their age. Hayate had gone from a half-paralysed suspected criminal to the army's youngest colonel. Fate had taken down the notorious terrorist Jail Scaglietti and two of his elite bodyguards by herself. Nanoha had refused more promotions than Fred had been offered in his entire life to remain on the front lines.

Fred had seen a few legends in his forty years. He fervently hoped that these ones would live a bit longer than the others.

Hayate was the shortest of the three, a vaguely motherly-looking brown-haired girl who gave them a friendly nod as they approached.

"Ah, you'd be Captain Krebs and Sergeant-Major Jones, yes? Pleased to meet you. This is Nanoha" – the auburn-haired girl on her left waved – "this is Fate" – the blonde on her right gave a grave smile – "and this" – she indicated the small maelstrom of activity behind her – "is my assistant, Reinforce Zwei."

Both men saluted.

"Colonel Yagami. It's an honour," Fred stated in his most professional tone.

"Oh, no need to be so formal. Just call me Hayate. Everyone else does." She turned to her subordinate. "Fate, would you be a dear and check with Navigation? I'd like to make sure we have a clear route out for the launch."

The girl nodded. "Understood."

"Oh, and Nanoha, I think things are starting to get slightly out of control out there. Would you mind trying to calm everyone down a bit?"

Nanoha smiled. "It _is_ rather noisy, isn't it? I'll see what I can do."

The two captains got up and walked out of the room, exchanging a quick peck on the cheek before heading off to their respective tasks. From the direction of the locker room there was the crackle of a magical explosion, followed by a few screams.

Fred blinked. "Oh. I wasn't aware that they were..."

"Friends?" Hayate asked, smiling sweetly.

He frantically attempted to backpedal. "Ah... sorry, I didn't mean to... um..."

She laughed. "Don't worry, you didn't. Just an old Section Six in-joke. We have a pretty loose definition of friendship around here. 'Befriending', too, though you _really_ don't want to be on the receiving end of that. Yes, they've been together for quite a while. Finally got it formalised a couple of months back. All the old crowd got to attend. Yuuno was best man, of course..."

She trailed off for a second, clearly reliving a happy memory.

Signum cleared her throat discreetly, and Hayate looked up with a guilty expression.

"Oh, sorry, I was getting distracted. Not had much sleep lately, though I suppose that's not really an excuse. Anyway, welcome to the First Military Expeditionary Force. As you've probably noticed, I run a fairly loose ship. Everyone here's seen a fair measure of action, and most of them have served together before, so I trust them to know who to listen to when the shooting starts. Most of the time, anyway. You two came highly recommended, so I won't tell you how to do what you do. The engineering, maintenance, and catering staffs have all been informed of your arrival, and look forward to meeting you. The one rule I _will_ mention is that everyone on this ship is expected to attend a minimum of three hours' combat training per week with Captain Takamachi. Don't worry – she's _very_ good at her job."

Her face abruptly grew serious.

"One last thing – if you have any prejudices against artificial humans, now is the time to leave them at the door. We have clones, familiars, sentient programs, combat cyborgs... the full set, basically."

"And Rein!" the silver-haired paper-shuffler piped cheerily.

"Hey! What about me?" her shoulder-seated compatriot objected.

"Oh, I left _you_ out on purpose," Rein replied with a dismissive toss of her head.

In a matter of seconds, green and purple streaks of light were flickering across the room as the two tiny girls chased each other around, volleying high-pitched insults. Hayate and Signum rolled their eyes.

"No problems over here," Fred assured them. "Everyone starts to look the same once they come back for the third tray of food."

"Disbelieving." Gunther elaborated.

Hayate's eyes widened. "Wait, are you telling me you've found a way to make shipboard rations taste _good_?"

Fred beamed with reflected pride. "Yep. Not my department, but he says it's all in how you balance the condiments. Well... something like that."

She grinned. "You know, I might have to have a talk with you at some point, captain. I'm something of a cook myself, you see."

Gunther saluted. "Ma'am."

"Well then, let's get started. Signum will show you to the ship – you can get settled in. Briefing's in two hours in the main theatre. I'm sure you're wondering what all this is about."

Another round of salutes, and the two men left the room, accompanied by Signum and her (badly bruised) companion, who loftily introduced herself as Agito, a Unison Device. Whatever that was. She'd been idly playing with a fireball the size of her head when she mentioned it, so Fred had decided that pressing the matter would not be wise.

The main locker room was rather more ordered than it had been when they last saw it, though he wasn't sure that the scorch marks on the ceiling had been there before. The two dogs were still ferrying things back and forth, while the blue-haired girl was clearing away debris with an ancient-looking plastic broom.

"Briefing in two hours, Subaru," Signum informed her.

Subaru looked up with a start and attempted an awkward salute, almost hitting herself over the head with the broom handle in the process. "Oh, um... right. Thanks for the heads-up, Captain Signum. Just finishing off here. It's not as easy as it looks."

"Pushing too hard," Gunther commented.

The other three turned to look at him.

"Umm... what do you mean, please, sir?" Subaru asked tentatively.

"Lighter brushing works better," he explained. "Also, remember to check the corners. Dirt always builds up there."

As Subaru stuttered her thanks, Signum shot Fred a quizzical glance at the quartermaster's unusual verbosity.

"He likes things tidy," he said with a shrug.

* * *

The _Eventide _was a big ship, a hundred and fifty metres long including the two enormous Arc-en-ciel projector fins. Nevertheless, it was dwarfed by the hangar it was currently berthed in. From their position atop the boarding walkway, Fred could see the tiny specks of the deck crew scurrying back and forth, carrying out the last pre-flight checks. Glowing runes criss-crossed the air, massive containers suspended by raw magic.

A girl who looked to be no more than eight years old stumped past with the bearing of a drill sergeant, a gigantic hammer slung casually over one shoulder. She looked up, and he saw that she had the same curiously elongated eyes as Signum.

"Hey, Boob Monster, are these the logistics boys? Sure hope so, because things are _really_ getting choked up down there."

Fred looked straight ahead, his face an expressionless mask. The slightest snigger, he knew, would be an open invitation to swift and painful death.

"They are indeed," Signum replied stiffly. "Vita, shouldn't you be helping Hayate with her packing?"

"Oh, right, yeah, I should probably get going. See ya." She inspected the two men for a second. "You know, I think you should get the fat one to the infirmary. Doesn't look too healthy."

Fred seized the opportunity like a drowning man thrown a lifeline. "Actually, she might have a point. I have been feeling a bit unwell. Don't think my lunch agreed with me. Best get it checked, right? Come on, boss, we're _leaving_."

With that, he scuttled off down the walkway, dragging Gunther behind him.

"Explain?" the older man gasped, pushing up his glasses with his free hand.

"I'm saving both our lives," he replied, and the laughter came bubbling out as he prayed with all his heart that Captain Signum was out of earshot.

Behind them, the two Wolkenritter shared a bemused glance.

* * *

As they reached the _Eventide_'s main cargo bays, Fred saw that Vita's analysis of the situation was rather more literal than he had expected. The cargo had mostly been left unsorted, and was stacked in a huge pile that blocked several passageways and had created a not insignificant queue of waiting deck-workers, some of them levitating containers bigger than they were. Gunther's face lit up – he was in his element here.

He strode over to the nearest worker and grabbed him by the shoulder. "Who's in charge?"

A panicked jerk of a thumb, and a short man in a blue coat several sizes too big found Gunther bearing down on him like the incarnate wrath of the Sankt Kaiser.

"Captain Krebs. Quartermaster."

"Oh, um... good to see you. I'm Sergeant D'Angelo. I've _almost_ got things under control here, but there's been a few... complications. You know how it is."

He grinned nervously. Gunther stared at him for a moment, and then thrust out his hand.

"Inventory."

"Right! Certainly! I'll just... um... go get it, shall I?"

The sergeant fled as fast as his dignity would allow. An emerald-green glow surrounded Gunther as he cast a loudspeaker spell on himself, and stepped up to the edge of the gantry.

**"Cancel loading. I repeat, cancel loading."**

The hubbub below ceased, and there was a series of gentle thuds as airborne containers were lowered to the ground.

**"You!"** He pointed imperiously at one of the lifters. **"Sort the cargo. Red left, blue right."**

The man saluted.

**"You! Hangar supervisor here. Now."**

An NCO nodded in acknowledgement, and bolted from the room.

Sergeant D'Angelo returned, red-faced and sweating heavily, a datapad clutched in his hand. Gunther skimmed its contents for a moment, and then returned to barking orders. Fred watched as order was gradually restored, before wandering off into the bowels of the ship.

_Time to meet the rest of the crew._

_

* * *

_

The _Eventide_'s briefing room was arranged in the classic semicircular theatre design, with a large holographic projector on the central stage. The maintenance crews were still busy preparing the ship, but all officers, front-line personnel, and civilian assets were in attendance. An unfortunate incident with a ration shipment two years out of date had delayed Fred and Gunther's arrival, and they were stuck with the seats near the back, next to a lady and gentleman whose large, bushy tails strongly hinted at the whereabouts of the two dogs they had seen earlier.

Hayate and Fate were fielding the briefing, along with a bespectacled, slightly feminine-looking young man who had introduced himself to Fred earlier as one Yuuno Scrya of the Infinite Library. The display was currently showing a stylised map of the known multiverse, with a large, angry red marker labelled 'Probable Breach Point' on the edge of the dimensional wound that was Chaotic Space.

"Two weeks ago by our reckoning," Fate began, "Interstellar Navigation's Deep Space Surveillance department picked up a dimensional disturbance of massive proportions originating from the unexplored universe designated U7W-1T4."

She indicated the marker.

"Though the universe itself is just on the friendly side of the divide between Wild Space and Chaotic Space, the disturbance originated from _inside_ the Great Wall."

Corporal Nakajima raised her hand.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but what do you mean by 'by our reckoning'?"

Yuuno cleared his throat. "I'll field this one. Time doesn't flow normally in Chaotic Space, an effect that also occurs to a lesser extent in the Wild Space surrounding it. Among other things, this makes limited time travel possible, though engaging in this is of course illegal due to the dangers it poses and the stress it exerts on the space/time continuum. In fact, some scholars have hypothesised that given the artificial nature of the Great Wall, Chaotic Space itself may be the result of an ancient, failed time-travel experiment."

"Who would have been capable of that?" Subaru's redheaded friend asked.

"Several theories exist. The lost civilisation of Al-Hazard is the most obvious option – we're pretty sure that they created the Great Wall, anyway. That said, it is equally possible that they did so to amend the mistake of an even _earlier_ set of precursors – as an archaeologist, I can assure you that they were by no means the first."

"Al-Hazard... the place my mother sought to reach." Fate said softly.

A few of the veterans looked less than pleased at the memory – Fred had accessed the file on the Testarossa Incident in his spare time, and had a good idea why. For such a small-scale operation, it had been very ugly indeed.

"Indeed so. As a matter of fact, the disturbance occurred quite close to the Garden of Time's last known position, though a connection between the two seems highly unlikely even given the aforementioned time-distortion effect. Employment of a Lost Logia artefact similar to the ones used by Precia Testarossa is not out of the question, though, whether intentional or otherwise."

"So... we're dealing with a malfunctioning device that may have been created by people who were myths of the _myths_ of the Belkans?" Vita summarised. Everyone heard the unspoken words at the end of that – _It _was_ a malfunction, right? Please tell me it was a malfunction._

"We honestly can't be sure." Yuuno replied wearily. "Chaotic Space is, to borrow a phrase from Earth, _terra incognita_. All our knowledge of the realms beyond the Great Wall is rooted in academic speculation. The disturbance might be a result of mechanical failure in the Wall, a natural occurrence like the eruption of a supervolcano, or even an effect of an external factor being introduced."

"An external factor... from _inside_ the Wall?" the enormous, grey-haired wolf-man near the two logisticians asked.

"Precisely. Though it is difficult, even impossible for ordinary life to survive very long in Chaotic Space, other forms of sentience, even ones existing without Linker Cores, are theoretically possible, particularly in a near-infinite multiverse such as our own."

_That_ observation caused a lot of perturbed muttering.

"Our mission profile is fairly straightforward," Hayate said, pointedly raising her voice above the noise. "We will go in, investigate the disturbance, and get out. No unnecessary heroics – whatever caused this, the fact remains that it sent a shockwave across the _entire multiverse_, and I, for one, have no intention of being at ground zero if it does so again."

Nanoha raised a hand. "Will we be employing power limiters?"

"Command placed that at the discretion of the expedition leader. So... no."

There were a few chuckles from the front row.

"Any further questions?" Hayate asked. "No? Very well. Dismissed."

As the crew rose from their seats, Fred turned to the dog-lady. "You all seem very relaxed about this. Do you do these things often?"

She waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, mostly we just deal with galactic or universal threats. This sort of thing's more of a weekly event."

He forced a smile. "Ah. That's all right, then."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Very well, a confession. So far, the only Nanoha media I have encountered first-hand are the three anime series - the various manga and Sound Stages (particularly and especially Sound Stage X) are only known to me via summaries from elsewhere. As for ViVid and the fourth-season stuff... well, I'm sure it's all fine and dandy, but let's just assume that the formation of the First Expeditionary Force moved the setting into an alternate continuity prior to all that happening. My head hurts less that way.

Anyways, on with the story. Oh, and the Nanoha/Fate stuff wasn't just me being a yuri fanboy (admittedly, I _am_, but that's neither here nor there) - I just considered it a logical progression from StrikerS. I mean, come _on_, they were sharing a bed and adopting a daughter together by that point. I mean, sure, it is technically possible to do all that in a 100% platonic, innocent manner, but frankly, I think Occam's Razor would like a word with you.


	4. Family Reunion

**3. Family Reunion**

The journey into Wild Space had lasted two weeks, and had been surprisingly uneventful. The _Eventide_'s prototype dimensional keel had performed as advertised, ably navigating them through the heavy currents that were a constant threat this close to the Wall. As such, there had been little for the crew to do other than dine, chat, gamble, and get pushed to the precise limits of their physical and mental endurance during Captain Takamachi's training sessions.

So far, Nanoha had reported satisfactory progress with most of the crew, though there were of course two glaring exceptions. The new logistics officers had become something of a running joke – Sergeant-Major Jones appeared to have an allergic reaction to the very _concept_ of physical fitness, and whilst Captain Krebs at least kept himself in shape, his appalling aim at anything greater than melee range made him as much of a danger to his own side as to any theoretical enemy.

It was fortunate, therefore, Hayate mused idly, that they had managed to make themselves useful in other ways. Krebs had kept the ship clean, well-supplied and well-fed whilst expending a probability-defying minimum of resources to do so, and Jones had proven himself an invaluable source of information regarding the moods and opinions of the crew. Though Hayate prided herself on successfully maintaining an open, friendly style of command, there was still no conceivable way for her to keep track of the individual needs of over a hundred people, and certainly not from the position of an equal. That was where the pudgy, cheerful sergeant-major came in, and he fulfilled his role most ably.

Hayate checked the display again. There was a breach in the Wall – a vast, ugly rent from which seething madness spilled out. This was the result of the disturbance – this was what they had come to investigate.

"Take us in closer," she ordered.

The helm officer saluted. "Aye-aye, ma'am."

The currents strengthened, as if the _Eventide_ was a true sea-vessel sailing through a storm. Hayate heard creaks and groans as the hull was placed under unimaginable stress, but paid them no heed. The ship had been designed to handle far worse than this.

"Colonel, we're getting something on the readouts, inside the breach," the sensors officer reported. "It's a solid object roughly the size of a planet... no, wait, it _is_ a planet. A planet in Chaotic Space! It's got a crust, mantle, core, and everything!"

"Can you bring us into orbit?"

"Affirmative, ma'am. Looks like the space surrounding it is pretty calm, like the eye of a storm. I've... I've never seen anything like this..."

The creaking intensified, and little yellow bars danced up and down on several of the gauges in Hayate's command display. She watched them intently, prepared to order the ship to turn back if any of them exceeded safe limits.

None of them did, though. As they approached the impossible planet, the currents dropped away, leaving them in a patch of tranquillity that almost didn't feel like part of one of the most dangerous and unpredictable areas in dimensional space.

"Do we have a visual on the object?" she asked.

"That's another affirmative, chief. Should be on the main viewer... now."

The massive screen at the front of the bridge jumped into life, and they looked out on the world below. It had once been a lush, verdant planet – there were still signs of plant life here and there – but was horribly scarred by some natural or (more likely) artificial disaster. Craters kilometres-wide pocked the surface like a case of geographical blackheads, whilst a continent-sized arrangement of burns seemed to form a single, gigantic rune that hurt the eyes of those that looked upon it. The seas were blood-red in colour, clearly tainted by some pollutant, and the clouds sparkled with an oddly disquieting polychromatic light.

"I've seen more welcoming places," Nanoha commented from beside the command platform.

Hayate nodded. Quite apart from the blatant impossibility of its location, there was something very, very wrong with this planet.

"We're getting signs of sentient life," Sensors reported, "but they're really distorted. There's even an energy spike on the southern continent that looks a _bit_ like the result of Mid-type magic, only... not. If there is a mage down there, though, they're triple-A at the very least. No way we could even stand a chance of detecting them otherwise."

"Understood," Hayate responded. "I'm taking a closer look. Magical Interface System, open."

The command desk slid apart, revealing two glowing hemispherical crystals, each about the size of a grapefruit. Hayate placed her hands on them, channelling her will.

The Magical Interface System was another innovation of the latest generation of TSAB vessels. It employed a complex crystalline network, effectively turning the entire ship into an enormous Armed Device for a brief period of time. With it, the ship's commander could channel their spells on a scale hitherto unseen. For wide-area specialists like Hayate, this was nothing but an advantage.

"_Eventide_, initiate Wide Area Search," she commanded, with an apologetic glance at Nanoha. The fact that a fair number of Hayate's spells had been stolen from her and Fate by the first Reinforce was something they preferred not to talk about.

A cluster of glowing spheres detached themselves from the _Eventide_ and hurtled down to the planet below. It would likely be several minutes until they found anything of interest. Hayate removed her hands from the interface, and stepped down from the command platform.

"Keep us on high alert," she ordered. "I don't want anything sneaking up on us."

* * *

It was a full quarter of an hour before the search bore fruit. By that time, most of the officers had either found an excuse to be on the bridge or just sneaked on and hoped nobody would notice. All attention was focused on the main viewer, which showed a grainy, indistinct image of what appeared to be a young girl sitting on a rocky outcrop. She was pale, fair-haired, and dressed in black, and she appeared to have some sort of staff-like object held in one hand.

"This would be our mage, I presume?" Signum enquired.

"That's what it looks like," Hayate agreed. She gestured, and other, smaller pictures appeared around the central display.

"As you can see from these, she, whoever she happens to be, is located at a point on the southern continent several klicks from another energy spike, this time of completely unknown origin. This second site bears signs of recent fortification – someone down there is expecting a fight."

"You think they saw us coming?" Vita asked.

"Hard to be sure. We're certainly the most obvious threat given the planet's relative lack of population, but there's some sort of disturbance going on in the neighbouring realspace as well. We haven't investigated it in detail – dropping out inside the Wall is a risk I'm not yet willing to take – but it's something to consider. In the meantime, though, we'll employ as many precautions as we can. The transport chambers will be prepped for emergency evacuation, and the Arc-en-ciel aimed at the target site. Worst-case scenario, we can teleport out the expedition team and vaporise the site from orbit, though I'm sure I don't have to tell you that that's an _absolute_ last resort."

Nanoha, meanwhile, had been studying the central image intently. "Fate," she said, finally giving voice to what the other Riot Force Six veterans were thinking, "doesn't she look like... well, like _you_ used to?"

Fate nodded. "Yes. Very much so. It's probably a coincidence, but..."

The rest went unspoken. There had been a _lot_ of strange coincidences on this trip. Perhaps too many.

There was a brief pause, and then the third Wolkenritter, Zafira, stepped forward, his tail swishing agitatedly.

"You mentioned an exploration team, Mistress Hayate," he rumbled. "Are we to assume, then, that some of us will be descending to the surface?"

"Indeed so. Sensors indicate that the atmosphere is breathable, if not exactly pleasant, and our transporters should be able to punch through the interference. It'll be a small group – I want us to look as little like an invading army as we can. Two forwards, and two backups in orbit."

"Requesting permission to volunteer, ma'am," Fate said a little too quickly.

"If she's going, I'm going," Nanoha added firmly.

Hayate smiled. "Agreed. Signum and Vita will be your seconds. We'll send you down in thirty minutes."

All four saluted, and left the bridge. Hayate pinched her temples. Fate, ever the calm, reliable voice of reason, was acting very oddly. And she'd called her 'ma'am', which was never a good sign. She hoped she'd made the right decision.

* * *

"Transport chamber checked and ready."

"Checked and ready, aye."

Nanoha looked around the chamber with detached curiosity. As a member of the Mid-Childan air force, she had rarely been on board a starship since the Scaglietti Incident, and that had been on the _Arthra_, a cruiser so elderly that it was retired immediately after the battle against the Saint's Cradle. This room was rather different from that old ship's basic transporter stage, two-tiered and surrounded with complicated-looking instrumentation. The technicians had informed her that not only could it teleport its passengers to any point on the planet's surface within line-of-sight with pinpoint precision, but it could also beam down their backups to their location without that restriction or even swap the forward and backup with a single action.

The forwards stood on the lower tier, the backups behind them on the upper. Signum was Nanoha's second, Vita was Fate's. Nanoha turned to her partner and gave her hand the reassuring squeeze that had become something of a pre-mission ritual for them.

The technicians looked up again.

"Transport in ten..."

"Nine..."

"Eight..."

"Seven..."

"Six..."

"Five..."

"Get on with it already," Nanoha heard Vita mutter under her breath.

"Four..."

"Three..."

Iridescent charging rings began to form around the transporter pads.

"Two..."

Both of the forwards engaged their Barrier Jackets.

"One..."

"Transporter engaged."

The walls around them blurred for a moment, and the bottom dropped out of Nanoha's stomach. She instinctively closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she and Fate were standing in the middle of a blasted, rocky wasteland, the strange multicoloured clouds above them. She took a few experimental breaths, and tasted sulphur. Relieved that she hadn't immediately expired, she decided that the whole breathing thing might be a good habit to keep up after all.

There was movement ahead, and she saw the young mage who had appeared on the viewer. She was even paler than Nanoha had thought – her skin was almost colourless, and her hair was the very lightest shade of blonde. Even from this distance, though, her eyes burned with power. The staff turned out not to be a staff at all, but rather an enormous scythe made of bone and some greyish metal that caught the light strangely. A glowing purple crystal adorned the head, and she leaned heavily on the weapon as she stood up. She approached them with a curious half-walk half-run, and as she came closer Nanoha saw that her face was split into a huge smile.

"Little sister!" she shrieked, and hurled herself at Fate, arms outstretched.

Nanoha's jaw dropped. It was technically true that she had considered the possibility, but only in the way that an amateur astronomer might idly wonder about the notion of a meteorite hitting Earth only to wake up the next morning and find that a second sun had appeared in the sky. Either one of the most enormous coincidences in human history had just occurred, or they were both the objects of a very, very cruel joke, and Nanoha wasn't sure which possibility she preferred.

Fate was even more flabbergasted. "A-Alicia? No, no, you can't be... this isn't real..."

"It is real, Fate," said the staff in a voice from the two women's nightmares. "Your sister lives, and I... I am sorry for what I did to you."

"_Mother_?"

"Our new friends didn't like what she did to you, sister, so Mother got put in here," Alicia chirped, tapping the scythe playfully. "They've been ever so nice, to us, though – they taught me so many things! You can call me Ali, by the way."

"They have educated me as well," Precia Testarossa interjected. "I now understand that I have two daughters, not one, and I bitterly regret what I put you through, Fate. Can you ever forgive me?"

By now, Fate was as pale-faced as her sister, staring blankly at this nonsensical apparition. Desperately, Nanoha stepped between them.

"I apologise, Ali, but this is all a bit too much for your sister at the moment." Eventide_, hot-switch on Captain Testarossa-Harlaown now! Get her to the infirmary!_

_On it, ma'am,_ one of the technicians responded over the telepathic link. _Hot-switch coming right up._

There was a blinding flash of light, and Fate vanished, replaced a second later by the diminutive form of Vita.

"What's up, Nanoha?" she asked, a note of concern injecting itself into her habitually brusque tone. "Did something happen to Fate?"

"This young lady," Nanoha explained, trying to keep her voice steady, "claims to be her sister, Alicia. Her Intelligent Device, meanwhile, apparently bears the spirit of Fate's mother, Precia."

Vita processed this. "Oh. Um... wow. OK then. Hold on a second, though – didn't they both die?"

"I did," Precia acknowledged. "My body was torn asunder by the Warp, what you call Chaotic Space. My soul remained, though, and Alicia's stasis pod kept her safe. The gods rescued us, and restored Alicia. They are truly great and wonderful beings."

"The... gods?" Nanoha asked. Precia had not, to the best of her knowledge, been a particularly religious woman in life. Amoral mad scientists tended not to be.

Though she was of course expressionless, they could _feel_ the dead woman's beatific smile as she spoke. "Tzintchi of the Nine Fingers. Asukhon, the Eightfold Victor. Reigle of the Seven Lives. Mislaato of the Six Wounds. Soon, the entire multiverse shall know their names, and soon the entire multiverse shall revere them as the saviours they are. Do you wish to learn more of them? It is a pleasure to enlighten others, especially friends of my daughter."

"That... might be a good idea," Nanoha said carefully. _Raising Heart, I want this recorded._

_Of course, my master,_ her Intelligent Device replied.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** ... Aaand _showtime_!


	5. Strangers in a Strange Land

**4. Strangers in a Strange Land**

In orbit, the operation was rapidly going from bad to worse. First, one of Hayate's best officers and oldest friends had come back from the surface a shellshocked, paralytic wreck. Now, the safe haven around the planet had turned out not to be as safe as they had expected. The storms had closed in from nowhere, tearing into the _Eventide_ with savage gusto.

"Dimensional keel at full capacity! Hull integrity under threat!" screamed one of the bridge crew over the ship's tortured groaning. "Estimated five minutes until a full breach!"

"No choice," Hayate sighed. "We're going to have to drop into realspace. Transport, can you retrieve Nanoha and Vita?"

"Negative, ma'am. The chamber's still recharging. We didn't know we'd have to use it again so soon, you-"

"Stow it," she growled. "Comms, can you at least send them a message? Tell them we'll be back as soon as the storm dies down."

"Aye-aye, ma'am." The communications officer sounded like he was on the verge of panic.

Hayate stood up and attempted to generate an aura of calm authority. "Helm, initiate the jump. All crew, brace for realspace transit."

Across the ship, all non-essential personnel leapt from their stations and secured themselves to the nearest solid object. The gentle hum of the engines rose to a piercing whine, and an enormous, wrenching lurch reverberated through the hull.

"Transition complete," Engineering reported. "Restoring power to primary systems. Wait, what the-"

The hull shuddered again, and warning lights blinked across the command desk.

"Report!" Hayate snarled.

"Energy weapon impact," Sensors said, disbelief creeping into his tone. "Glancing hit. Minor damage to the starboard hull. It... it went through our wards like they weren't even there!"

_If it isn't one thing..._ "Engineering, do we have motive power?"

"A-affirmative, ma'am."

"Commence evasive manoeuvres," she ordered. "Sensors, can you please find out _what is going on out there_?"

The sensors officer looked up from his station, his face pale. "Well, ma'am... it looks like we jumped into the middle of a warzone."

Images started to appear on the main viewer, and an overall picture gradually emerged. On one side were eight enormous ships shaped like hollow, flattened teardrops with glowing hoop-like structures in their centres. Four of them were engaging their enemy, while the other four were taking up formation several thousand kilometres away. It was into the firing lanes of the first group that the _Eventide_ had inadvertently jumped. On the other were a rag-tag flotilla of smaller ships of several different shapes and sizes, ranging from bulky, functional dreadnoughts to oddly angular saucer-shaped vessels with pyramid-like structures at their hubs, assaulting the hoop-ships with suicidal courage. The system's star had apparently collapsed recently, and near it was a blue-glowing ring-shaped structure several hundred metres across with the wreckage of several hoop-ships scattered around it.

"Helm, keep us out of this mess until the dimensional storms die down," Hayate ordered. "This isn't our fight."

"Aye-aye, ma'am. Entering low-visibility mode."

The _Eventide_ cut its emissions, drifting in space as harmlessly as a passing asteroid. Satisfied that nobody still wanted to shoot at them, Hayate contacted the infirmary.

"Shamal, how's Fate doing?"

"She's calmed down a little, and I prescribed her some sedatives," the fourth Wolkenritter responded, her motherly voice etched with worry. "It looks like she suffered a nasty shock down there – she was saying something about her mother, of all people."

"I... see. Thank you, Shamal. Could you inform me when she wakes up, please?"

"Of course."

It was then that the four rearmost hoop-ships did something very strange indeed. Crackling beams of light emerged from their centres, intersected with each other, and formed a colossal ring fourteen thousand kilometres across.

"Colonel, according to these readings, those ships are generating some sort of dimensional disturbance," Sensors reported. "Magnitude is... off the charts."

A curious rippling effect appeared within the ring, and something huge began to emerge.

"I... think they're trying to drag that planet into realspace," he continued, aghast. "_Is that even physically possible_?"

Possible or not, it was indeed happening. The _Eventide_'s crew watched in awe as the lost world nosed its way into the system, shyly displaying its scarred face to the surrounding ships.

The firing line began to retreat towards the planet, keeping up a frankly terrifying rate of fire as they did so. The battle began to swing in their favour as more and more of the opposing ships died... when one of the vessels maintaining the ring abruptly exploded.

The energy beam lashed out, catching another of the generator-ships and obliterating it utterly. With two now gone, it flickered and disappeared. The rippling ceased, and the storm-wracked planet began to disappear into Chaotic Space once more. Two of the hoop-ships smoothly detached themselves from the firing line and took up position where their fallen compatriots had been, restarting the forced transit.

"Sensors, what just happened?" Hayate demanded.

"High-velocity kinetic impact," he replied. "As far as I can tell, it came from the planet's surface."

_They have ground-to-orbit weaponry? Wonderful._

"Take us towards that planet," she commanded. "We're getting Vita and Nanoha out of there _now_."

The engines hummed smoothly to life, and they watched intently as the _Eventide_ closed the distance to transporter range. Twenty thousand kilometres... nineteen... eighteen...

An alarm sounded, screaming across the bridge.

"Weapon lock!" the sensors officer shrieked. "One of the guards is bringing its main gun to bear on us!"

"Magical Interface System, open!" Hayate shouted desperately, slamming the palms of her hands onto the control crystals.

"_Eventide_, Flash Move!"

Two huge, magical wings unfolded from the heavy frigate's sides as it pirouetted away, the ravening energy beam passing within a mere hundred metres of it. Hayate reached a decision.

"Lieutenant Rostov, begin charging the Arc-en-ciel. Target the closer of the two guard-vessels."

The weapons officer saluted. "Roger that, ma'am. Commencing barrel expansion."

The _Eventide_ smoothly rolled into position, a series of glowing white charging rings appearing in front of the two huge projector fins that formed its prow.

"Firing Lock System, open," Hayate said, and watched as a small, transparent box appeared above her command desk in a pillar of green light.

She took a nondescript red key from around her neck and inserted it into the box, nodding with satisfaction as the device turned the same ominous colour.

"Power spike from the target!" Sensors yelled. "It's going to attack us again!"

Hayate turned the key and closed her eyes.

"Arc-en-ciel, fire."

The charging rings vanished, replaced by a ball of pale blue energy that dwarfed the frigate. A gigantic, cloudy lens formed in front of it, and it shot forwards, reshaping itself into a beam a hundred metres across that struck the nearest hoop-ship dead centre. Space tore itself apart around the two remaining ships of the firing line, obliterating them on the molecular level in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics. The transit ring around the planet shut off, and the four generator-vessels advanced towards the _Eventide_, their energy signatures flaring as they charged their weapons.

As they did so, however, the flotilla opposing them closed in, presenting an artificial barrier between the hoop-ships and their prey.

"I think we made an impression," Lieutenant Rostov remarked drily.

* * *

_...tain Takamachi... currents rising... realspace transi... back for you..._

The communications officer's voice over the telepathic link was faint, garbled, and distorted, disappearing altogether at random intervals.

_Say again, _Eventide_!_ Nanoha demanded. _We're losing you!_

_...rry... _The link went dead.

Vita swore colourfully, and Alicia looked at them in puzzlement.

"Is something wrong?"

"We've lost contact with our ship," Nanoha explained. "You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?"

The girl's forehead creased. "No, but Toji might. I'll ask him."

She held what appeared to be a muttered conversation with herself, before Nanoha realised that her outfit contained some sort of throat-mike.

Alicia looked up, her expression worried. "Toji says the warp-storms are back, and something's coming. Something bad."

"Bad like what?" Vita asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know. I hope it's enemies, though. I haven't killed anything yet. We should get back to the others. Follow me."

She set out over the rough ground, using the scythe as a walking stick. Nanoha and Vita shared a glance, and then followed.

_Nanoha, is it just me, or is there something wrong with this kid? _Vita asked.

_I'd noticed that myself,_ she replied. _Keep your eyes open, Vita. I don't like this at all._

A silence fell on the little group as they trudged across the plain. After a while, Nanoha decided to break it.

"Alicia, who is this Toji person?"

The girl gave a sunny smile. "Oh, he's my best friend! He's big and he's strong and he's in charge of a whole chapter of soldiers! I'll show him to you when we get to the base!"

"Please excuse my daughter's exuberance," Precia said with amused tolerance. "The man she refers to is Primarch Toji Suzuhara, commander of the gods' forces on this world. He has been very kind to us – I think you'll like him."

"Then I look forward to meeting him," Nanoha replied politely. "Would that be your base, by the way?"

They had reached the edge of a massive indentation in the land. Ahead of them was a network of low, forbidding fortifications, amidst which soldiers and vehicles patrolled with subdued urgency. At the centre of the encampment was a gangling, armoured figure easily forty metres tall that moved like a giant human rather than the war machine it assuredly was.

Alicia nodded. "Yep. We built it around this big ring-shaped thing called a Stargate. Apparently, it can take you to other planets with just a couple of steps, though I've been looking at it when the scientists weren't around, and I think – wait, what's going on? What's happening to the sky?"

The two TSAB agents looked up, open-mouthed, as the very heavens split open. The glowing clouds fled unnaturally quickly, only to be replaced by cold, starry darkness. A band of flickering white energy arched from horizon to horizon, providing dim illumination of the surface below.

"_What in the name of hell just happened_?" Vita shouted.

"I... I think we just dropped into realspace," Nanoha replied. "Alicia, what does Toji have to say about this?"

After a few seconds of whispered conference, Alicia looked up with a secretive smile. "He says that you should _watch the base_."

Below them, the giant at the centre of the camp knelt down and picked up a long, thin grey object. It stood up, took a moment to aim, and then hurled the object skywards. A few moments passed, and then a colossal explosion lit up the sky and the band of light vanished.

Vita's jaw dropped again.

"Did that thing just use a _javelin_ as an _orbital weapon_?"

Alicia watched their expressions with delight. "Evangelions are fun, aren't they?"

Her throat-mike crackled.

"Toji says that we should be expecting more friends to play with soon. I'm supposed to help provide aerial support. Wanna come?"

_I doubt that Fate would particularly appreciate her sister getting killed,_ Nanoha said telepathically.

_Damn straight,_ Vita agreed. _I've got a really bad feeling about this, though, Nanoha. Like you said, we should keep our eyes open._

As one, they took to the air in pursuit of Alicia.

The first they saw of the 'friends' was a curious glittering in the air that gradually resolved itself into a swarm of bulbous dart-like fighters, the dim starlight gleaming off their hulls. As the three mages approached, they opened fire, a storm of energy blasts streaking towards them. Nanoha and Vita activated their wards, both trying to cover Fate's sister in their radius as well. Alicia, on the other hand...

"Lash of Torment," she snarled, her childish voice twisted into something inhuman.

A polychromatic energy whip appeared from the head of her scythe, slicing through the fighters with terrifying ease. It did something strange and terrible to the pilots within – their screams of agony were unnaturally loud, audible even over the noise of the dying aircraft.

Alicia giggled happily as the flaming wreckage rained down around her. She looked down, and the giggle turned into a full-fledged, delighted laugh. Several of the fighters were flying low to the ground, dropping what looked like stacks of grey-white rings as they did so. Once they had landed, the rings rose on top of each other and began to emit steady pulses of light, releasing a horde of silver-armoured soldiers onto the battlefield.

"Toji!" she shrieked. "Toji, they're landing _troops_!"

A shot from one of the fighters struck her and she snarled like an animal, flying after the offending craft and gracefully landing on its hull. Her scythe flared with unholy energies and she slammed it into the cockpit-section, peeling it open. The fighter lurched sideways and the pilot fell out, screaming in terror as he plummeted towards the earth.

Alicia wasn't done with him, though.

She shot downwards, impaling him in mid-air with a swing of her scythe. Glowing black charging rings etched with unfamiliar runes appeared around her hand, and her voice took on that strange distortion again.

"Soul Stealer."

She punched her open hand into the pilot's chest, ripping out his heart in a single fluid motion. A quick shake of the scythe, and the wreckage that had once been his body fell away, but a faint blue outline remained around the gory relic clutched in her hand. There was a crack of bone, and her mouth stretched inhumanly wide. She devoured the heart with a single gulp, smiling in satisfaction as the pilot's soul howled and vanished.

"Divine Buster."

A huge beam of pink light slammed into Alicia and she lost consciousness, the scythe shrinking into a tiny pendant around her neck.

"Axel Fin."

Nanoha sped forwards, catching her as she fell. _Come on, Vita, let's get out of here._

_Fate isn't going to be happy,_ Vita commented as they flew away from the battle, hugging the ground.

_She'll be even less happy when she finds out what these... people did to her sister,_ Nanoha replied grimly. _Are those fighters still after us?_

_Nope, they got intercepted,_ Vita said, clearly shaken. _Nanoha, it's_ really _ugly back there._

The TSAB captain kept flying, not looking back. Vita was a centuries-old sentient combat program who had, until recently, been one of the heralds of an insanely potent magical weapon of mass destruction. If even _she_ was nauseated, Nanoha had no intention of finding out why.

Their escape route was taking them past the main battle. The silver-plated soldiers were opposed by hulking behemoths easily eight feet tall, clad in bulky multicoloured armour. The former had the advantage of numbers, certainly, but the latter had vastly superior equipment, not to mention dark sorcery that crackled across the battlefield like a living creature. In the distance, Nanoha saw that the forces of what Precia had called 'Chaos' had set up several curious-looking artillery pieces that arced bulky, strange-looking projectiles towards the enemy. As they grew closer, she saw that said projectiles were in fact more of the giant soldiers, screaming battle-cries as they landed in the midst of their silver-armoured foes.

She shook her head in disbelief. _This is madness._

_Too right,_ Vita agreed. _Nanoha! Infantry at twelve o'clock! Oh shi-_

The photon flash grenade went off at a point precisely between the two mages, overloading their senses with a wall of light and sound. Nanoha screamed and dropped Alicia, desperately trying to raise a ward. A single shot rang out, and Vita fell to the ground, her body nearly bisected.

These soldiers of Chaos were even bigger than their compatriots, wearing ridiculously thick armour that nearly transformed them into self-contained walking tanks. Two of them strode forward to catch Vita and Alicia, and the former had an enormous weapon jammed to her head whose nozzles and fuel tanks identified it as some sort of flamethrower.

A third soldier, easily a head taller than the others, stared up at Nanoha, his helmet's ornately-decorated faceplate hiding his expression.

"All right, miss," he boomed, his voice amplified and tinny. "This is Primarch Toji Suzuhara, commander of the Sons of Toji, funnily enough. Deactivate that staff of yours, or your friend fries."

Nanoha obliged, the charging rings around Raising Heart's head vanishing as quickly as they had appeared. "Now what?"

"Now?" Toji replied. "Now, we get these two girls some medical attention, and you leave us alone, miss."

"You expect me to just stand here while you cart off Vita and Alicia?" Nanoha asked quietly. All she needed was for that one to lower his flamethrower for a moment...

"Oh, not in the slightest. Matter of fact, I think you'll be departing first." He nodded to a point somewhere behind the hovering mage. "Ladies? _Get her_."

She spun round, raising her staff just in time to deflect a blow from a huge, razor-sharp axe that sent numbing shocks up her arms. Said axe's wielder was a leather-winged, red-skinned woman clad in dull bronze armour with a belt of skulls around her waist. Behind her, seven identical creatures swooped in for the attack.

They were fast, they were vicious, and they hopelessly outnumbered her. Nanoha beat a hasty retreat, sending a barrage of pink energy blasts behind her as she fled.

* * *

On the ground, the Terminator holding Vita turned to his Primarch.

"May I ask why you wish this girl spared, Lord Toji?" he asked.

"OK, first, because I don't know many eight-year-old girls who could survive a direct hit from a bolter round, and I reckon the gods will be wanting a look. Second, _because she's an eight-year-old girl_. Who I just shot and then used as a human shield. Just... just get the apothecary working on her, will you? Warp's teeth, Hikari's going to have my _hide_ for this..."

The Terminator saluted. "Of course, Lord Toji."

Toji stared at his subordinate suspiciously. "Wait... do you mean 'of course I'll get her to medical', or 'of course the daemon princess you somehow got married to is going to flay you alive when she finds out you've been brutalising children'?"

"... Of course, Lord Toji."

"Not encouraging, Hargreaves."

"My apologies, sir. It shall be as you ordered." The heavily-armoured Marine clanked off, his broken, bleeding cargo cradled gently in one massive hand.

The Primarch sighed and checked his helmet readouts, his brow already crinkled in worry. The technicians were reporting more activity from the Ori supergate. Tzintchi's predictions had been accurate as always.

"Commence Operation Leliel," he ordered. "We're done here."

_And may the gods have mercy on our souls._

* * *

The four hoop-ships opened fire, the deadly energy beams appearing from their prow dishes once more. The blocky dreadnoughts moved to intercept them, their shields taking the brunt of the damage.

"Four minutes of power for the Magical Interface System remaining, ma'am," Lieutenant Rostov reported. "Time until the Arc-en-ciel is recharged... five minutes."

Hayate nodded. "Understood. Rein, you ready?"

The diminutive Unison Device gave her a thumbs-up. "Ready!"

Clutching the interface pads, she began the incantation. "Come forth, wind of snow, and become the fletching which falls from the heavens."

Outside the ship, four large white charging rings began to form.

"_Eventide_, Hræsvelgr!"

A quartet of magical missiles launched from the rings, each half the size of the frigate itself. They slammed into the four remaining defenders in rapid succession, overloading their shields and blasting chunks out of their hulls.

Hayate took a moment to assess the damage, and then commenced a second incantation. "Resound, horn of judgement."

This time, the charging pattern was a triangle rather than a series of rings, suspended beneath the ship.

"_Eventide_, Ragnarok!"

The points of the triangle grew into a trio of crackling spheres, before collapsing into a mass of blue beams. They closed in on one of the two central hoop-ships and tore it to pieces, punching through it like wet tissue paper.

"Change in the enemy's engine profiles," Sensors announced. "They're retreating."

"One minute until the Arc-en-ciel's ready," Rostov added.

The colonel lifted her hands from the interface pads, letting them sink back into the command desk.

"Do not pursue," she ordered. "If they don't want any more trouble, that's fine by me."

As she sat down in her chair again, a thought occurred. Due to the ready availability of extremely potent non-lethal weaponry, battles between mages tended to have a fairly low body-count. People had died before on missions she had commanded, mostly due to some demented Belkan fighting-style, but not very often. Space battles, though... they were different. No matter what effect the weapon you'd been hit with had on living flesh, your ship exploding around you would still be rather difficult to survive. Hayate realised that this was quite possibly the first time she had been directly responsible for the deaths of other people. Likely _lots_ of other people. They had been big ships, after all.

It was... curiously numbing, as feelings went.

"Another energy spike, colonel," Sensors reported wearily. "Looks like something big's coming through that gate-thing near the star."

The new arrival was absolutely enormous, based on the same design principles as the hoop-ships but bigger, bulkier, and generally more intimidating. It approached the planet with disconcerting speed, powerful beam weaponry lancing from its flanks. Those flotilla vessels struck simply exploded, their shields unable to handle an assault of such magnitude.

"We won't have time to fire the Arc-en-ciel," Hayate decided. "Helm, let's move. We'll use the planet as cover."

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

"Are we in transporter range yet?" she asked.

"That we are, ma'am," one of the technicians replied. "Got the ground team's marker pinned down, too. Well... one of them, anyway. Can't find Lieutenant Vita's signature."

_Please be a glitch, please be a glitch, please be a glitch..._ "Keep looking. Comms, patch me through to Captain Takamachi."

"Affirmative, ma'am. Going live... now."

_Hayate, is that you?_ The TSAB's Ace of Aces sounded tired, strained, and more than a little frightened.

_Nanoha, report._

_It's bad, Hayate. I'm under attack, Vita's been captured, and Alicia... Hayate, they've turned her into a monster. The things I've seen... even Scaglietti wasn't this bad. Not by a long way. This is evil, Hayate. Pure evil._

_Wait – Vita's been captured?_

_Captured and injured. There was... there was nothing I could do. I think I might be able to get her back, but it'll take time. Several hours on the inside. What's the situation in orbit?_

As if on cue, the sensors officer piped up. "That big fellow's taken up position just outside the atmosphere. It's powering up, and the readings... well, they're pretty enormous, is all I can say. Colonel, if you want me to keep doing my job, I'm going to need some bigger charts."

Hayate sighed_. I don't think you have that long, Nanoha. What are they doing down there?_

_Some sort of ritual. It's lighting up everything for miles around. _Her tone was both disgusted and horrified. _Even from this range, I can smell the blood._

_Roger that. You think they're trying to protect themselves?_

_It seems likely. Precia said some of them can see the future. They must have expected this... whatever it is._

Hayate pinched her temples again. There was no good decision here.

_We can't afford to lose anyone else. Nanoha, we're pulling you out. Leave Vita where she is_. A little piece of her soul died as she said it.

_... Affirmative, ma'am._

A few minutes passed, and then the comm-link to the transport chamber crackled.

"Captain Takamachi is back on board, ma'am."

"Understood. Send her to the infirmary for a check-up, will you? She sounded like she was at the end of her tether." _Her and me both._

"Estimated two minutes until that dreadnought-thing does whatever it's about to do," Sensors reported. "Wait, what's happening down there?"

An odd rippling motion passed across the surface of the planet, before simply disappearing with the same lack of ceremony that had heralded its arrival.

"Colonel, according to these readings," he said, his voice shaking, "someone just managed to swap that dirty great chunk of rock _with its own shadow_. What we're seeing now is a simple illusion while the real thing makes a jump into dimensional space on the sly. Very sneaky, and violating more laws of physics than I care to name, but I'm starting to get used to that."

A massive flare of light appeared from beyond the horizon.

"... And that, I believe, is our dreadnought friend opening fire," Sensors continued lightly. "Guess he didn't get the memo."

The bridge crew watched in silence as continents cracked and the atmosphere boiled away.

"It's a very... _realistic_ illusion, isn't it?" Hayate said at last.

"Oh yeah," Sensors agreed. "Doubt you could even register it as one without a full dimensional sensor suite. I _could_ try calculating the amount of power it'd take to produce and sustain something like that, but then I'd have to lie down and take my pills, and I hate it when that happens. Speaking of dimensional bullshittery, though, the storms have dissipated. If you want to take another dip in Chaotic Space, now's the time."

Hayate nodded in acknowledgement. "Helm, prepare for transit. We're following that planet."

The jump in was rather smoother than the one out had been. A perfectly circular portal to dimensional space opened in front of the _Eventide_, and it glided straight in. The only thing anyone on board who wasn't paying specific attention would have noticed was a small jolt as they exited realspace.

Ahead of them was the daemon-world, looking positively pristine in comparison to the illusory wreckage in realspace. Hayate grinned wolfishly.

"All hands, finish the safety checks and then prepare for planetary assault. Mission profile is hostage retrieval."

The bridge crew saluted and returned to their posts. Everyone, that was, except the poor beleaguered sensors officer.

"Ma'am," he said in a tiny, overly formal voice, as if reading from a manual, "the dimensional storms are rising again. According to my calculations, they will destroy the ship unless we leave for the breach in the Wall within the next six minutes. As an officer of the Time-Space Administration Bureau, I'm afraid I cannot condone military action under these circumstances."

Hayate stared at him for a moment, and then lowered her gaze. "Very well, I concede to your expertise. Comms, belay that last order. Helm, plot us a course for Wild Space. Lieutenant Rostov, you have the bridge."

Not waiting for an acknowledgement, she stepped down from the command platform and strode out of the room. She stared straight ahead as she passed through the corridors, the only sounds the rising hum of the engines and the tapping of her shoes on the hard floor. Eventually, she reached her room, inputted the security code, and stepped in. She waited for the door to close behind her, and then collapsed, sobbing, on her bed.

A few minutes, later, the door reopened, and Signum, Shamal, and Zafira filed in. They walked over to where Hayate lay, knelt down, and hugged her wordlessly.

* * *

**Author's notes:** It is a truth universally acknowledged that a crossover story in posession of a space battle must be in want of funky, fleet-based technosorcery. Or if it isn't, it damned well should be.

Why did I change Operation Leliel? Three reasons. First, Bloodhaven's a pretty useful place. I can think of a few characters who'd be interested in keeping it around. Second, it seemed more thematically-suited to the overgrown tennis-ball's M.O. in _Evangelion_. Third, it was just plain cool, and a nice display of what the forces of Chaos can do if they put their minds to it.

Now, what was Kyon up to in the meantime, I wonder...?


	6. Holiday Plans

**5. Holiday Plans**

It had been a month since the meeting, and Kyon had spent most of it as a veritable heap of anxiety. Nagato had reported more and more troop movements, the visitors had started sending small, inexplicable requests every so often (why did they want the Brigade to play basketball rather than baseball one day?), and the spontaneous tuxedo hadn't exactly been easy to explain to his parents, either. In fact, it was almost a perverse relief when the second hotel invite came in the post. At least now he had someone to demand answers from.

He couldn't help noticing that they'd abandoned the pretence of the summoning ritual.

This time, the meeting was in the hotel's penthouse. _No witnesses to shady dealings there, I guess_. The porter in the lobby greeted him like an old friend, complimenting him on his suit and effusively ushering him into the main lift, a wood-panelled affair that played the inevitable soft classical music as he ascended.

Said penthouse turned out to be rather different to the rest of the hotel – an airy quasi-Mediterranean affair with lots of colonnades and stained-glass windows. At the centre was an elaborate swimming pool with magnificently-carved marble statuary serving as fountains near the far end. Even discounting other rooms, the place seemed far too large for the rest of the building to support – something he _really_ didn't want to contemplate too hard.

From a nearby pool chair, Shinji gave him a cheery smile.

"Hey again, Kyon. Got a chair for you over here – sit yourself down. I'm sure you've had a busy day."

The exhausted student nodded his thanks – Haruhi had taken an interest in cross-country running that day, and he'd had to fish poor Miss Asahina out of no less than three impressively tangled masses of thorny vegetation. He wandered over, but stopped abruptly when he rounded the side of Shinji's chair and saw just _why_ the young god had such a huge grin on his face.

The red-headed girl, Asuka, looked up and gave a nonchalant "Hi there" before going back to work.

Kyon retreated hastily. "Oh, sorry, didn't realise you were... umm... busy. I can come back later, if you want, or..."

He bumped into something soft and warm, turned around, and saw a _very_ naked Misato Katsuragi regarding him with an amused expression. "Oh, don't worry, we're pretty relaxed in terms of the formalities around here. Honestly, you're a teenager with access to the Internet. It's not like you've never seen breasts before. Now, sit yourself down – you look like you're about to keel over. I'll take your jacket."

The motherly words were delivered in a breathtakingly seductive tone, creating a cognitive dissonance that fused Kyon's beleaguered brain into an unresponsive mess. He didn't put up the slightest bit of resistance as the raven-haired woman skilfully peeled off the jacket and then gently but firmly frogmarched him to the pool chair, where a similarly clothing-devoid Rei Ayanami climbed into his lap and promptly fell asleep.

_OK, Kyon,_ he thought to himself as his higher mental functions slowly resurfaced from beneath the sea of hormones, _you've been in plenty of strange situations before. Being sexually harassed by the astral projections of extradimensional deities, though? Definitely a new one._

"Like the apartment, by the way?" Shinji asked genially. "We decided its existing state just wouldn't do, so we made a few modifications. The jacuzzi, by the way, will take you to another dimension – figuratively _and_ literally."

"Very... umm... nice," Kyon managed. "Look, why did you want me here?"

The god clapped his hands. "Ah, yes, to business! The thing is, Kyon, that one of the missions we've been supervising went a bit tits-up. Idiot of a captain decided to play pirate with a transwarp gate. Very messy. Nothing to worry about, really, just a bit of a dimensional shockwave, but we think it'd be best for all concerned if Haruhi was distracted for the next week. Things could get... weird, and that's coming from a guy who has a few dozen eyeballs in his everyday form."

"I... see," he replied, trying to keep focused. Rei apparently liked to wriggle in her sleep, and it was proving most distracting. "What do you suggest?"

"Well, we've got several options. Misato, of course, suggested an orgy."

"A few basic techniques and the right cocktail of drugs, and she won't even know what _planet_ she's on, let alone that it's getting hit by a ripple in the space-time continuum. Neither will you, for that matter." She studied his expression, and rolled her eyes. "High-schoolers. Spend the majority of their lives fantasising about things like this, but when you actually _suggest_ it to them they look at you like you just asked them to publicly sodomise a chicken. Well, apart from that one guy for whom the situation was sort of reversed, but we don't like to talk about that. There are some things even the _gods_ were not meant to know."

"Moving on," Shinji interjected hastily, "Rei's plan was to put her out of action with a minor illness. Some strain of the 'flu, wasn't it?"

"Influenza-B, to be specific," she said sleepily, leading Kyon to wonder just how long she had been awake. "Miss Suzumiya's biological structure indicates a mild immunity to that, which renders the possibility of complications setting in relatively unlikely. If it proves insufficient for our purposes, though, I can easily extend its effect."

The student nodded slowly. "That... might actually be a good idea. I don't like the prospect of dealing with Haruhi with cabin fever, but I think we can live with it. Probably. Any other suggestions?"

"Funny you should ask," Shinji replied, "because I had a little number of my own set up. Congratulations, Kyon, because you and your friends have just won the Canadian Grand Railway Hotels Tour contest, which technically doesn't _exist_ until you give the go-ahead, but that's a minor detail. Private jet to Vancouver, and then a luxury train car of your very own all the way to Montreal, stopping off at five-star hotels in Banff and Toronto along the way. Trip of a lifetime, my friend, with opportunities for excitement, adventure, and, dare I say it... _romance_?"

Kyon's forehead creased. "We're still in the middle of the term, though. How are you going to deal with that?"

"Fire extinguisher leak. Should close the school for the appropriate amount of time, I think. Rest assured, I've covered all the angles. It's what I do, after all."

"Hey!" Asuka objected. "You never told him my plan!"

Shinji gave a tolerant smile. "You'll have to excuse my wife here. I love her dearly, but she does rather assume that any given problem can be solved by hitting the right person over the head with something metallic."

"That's not fair," she objected. "Sometimes you have to go for the kidneys. People wear helmets, remember?"

He sighed. "See what I mean? Anyway, all that's needed is for you to give the word, Kyon. Don't worry about your or Haruhi's parents, either – we took the liberty of buying up the businesses where they work a while back, and I'm pleased to report that they just won a couple of office lotteries. Paris and Kenya beckon, respectively. You needn't expect any trouble from the school board, either, for much the same reason."

"That... was not part of our contract," Kyon said coldly. Anger was good. Anger helped him concentrate.

"Oh, I'm sorry, do we have to ask permission to give you gifts? That's what this is, after all. Our way of saying 'thanks' for all your help. Where do you think all those bonuses and promotion opportunities were coming from? We're very generous to our friends, you know. It's our_ enemies_ who have to worry."

Even through the clouds of fear, exhaustion, and testosterone poisoning, the unspoken message was obvious. _Don't be our enemy._

"Besides," Shinji continued, "there's _so_ much more we could offer you. Rei, dear, I think we should give our guest a taster."

The blue-haired girl smiled, stretched, and _changed_. Suddenly, Kyon had a naked Mikuru Asahina resting on top of him.

The god sitting opposite him grinned. "Like it? That's not all."

He gestured, and Haruhi Suzumiya and Yuki Nagato stood where Asuka and Misato had been a moment before. Neither of them were wearing anything, either.

"Any desire, any fantasy you have can be fulfilled," Shinji continued. "We've seen you, Kyon. How you kept those pictures rather than deleting them. How you hesitate just a moment longer than you should when Haruhi decides to 'play' with poor little Mikuru. How you never reported that business with the computer club. You want this, Kyon. You know it, I know it. All you have to do is _ally with us_. No strings, no small print. That's it."

Kyon's mouth was open. He closed it.

"Anything… I … want?"

The god nodded. "Anything."

He shook his head. "This is a big decision. I need time to think."

Shinji smiled obligingly. The goddesses reverted to their original forms and Rei removed herself from his lap.

"Please, feel free. Just don't take too long – we need to be ready for the shockwave, remember?"

"Right."

Kyon walked slowly and carefully out of the room, feeling their eyes bore into him. He'd completely forgotten his jacket.

* * *

Once he was outside the hotel, Kyon hailed the nearest taxi. "North High School, as fast as possible."

The driver nodded, and he positively dived into the back seat. It took ten minutes to reach the bottom of the long path leading up to the school, and once the car had slowed to a halt, he leapt out, not stopping to pay the fare.

The driver's angry yells echoing in his ears, he sprinted up the slope, shoulder-barging through a small group of late-departing students. He slammed open the doors to the main building and took the stairs two at a time, hoping against hope that one of the Brigade had decided to stay after school.

_Second floor. My stop._ He staggered down the corridor, trying to ignore the burning sensation in his legs, shoved open the door to the SOS Brigade's headquarters, and breathed a sigh of relief. Nagato was sitting by the table, nose in one of her omnipresent books.

"Yuki!" he gasped.

She looked up. It wasn't often he used her first name.

"Yuki, it's those visitors. They've got my parents – hell, they've got half the _town_ under their thumb, and they tried to bribe me. It doesn't matter how, what's important is that _we have to get rid of them_."

She kept staring at him. Her hair took on a bluish tinge, and her eyes became a deep shade of red.

"That's very interesting, Kyon," Rei Ayanami said.

Dark, rusted chains shot out of the ground, fastening themselves around his wrists and ankles. The air shimmered and the other three gods materialised, all of them wearing the expensive-looking formal garb from their first meeting.

Shinji clucked his tongue with disapproval. "Bad call, kid, bad call indeed. It was such a promising offer, too. Matter of fact, I'm rather curious. Why _did_ you turn us down?"

"My friends will-"

"… not be coming," the god finished for him. "We've cut this place off from the rest of your universe, and covered our tracks quite tidily, though I do say so myself. Wasn't easy, though – your friend Miss Asahina's organisation in particular has some pretty nifty equipment. Please, answer the question."

Kyon slumped his shoulders in defeat. "Two reasons, really. First off, I simply didn't trust you. We allowed you to send out the odd expedition through our universe, and you launched an invasion fleet whilst taking over our city from the inside. With me in your pocket, who knows what you could have done? Subverted the Integrated Data Entity? Weaponised Haruhi? Even your existing foothold is much too large to be safe."

Shinji nodded to his companions. "Told you he was smart. What was the other reason?"

"The thing was, I knew that there was one thing you were telling the truth about – you could give me anything I wanted. Any_one_, too. I've seen you in action – you're big on getting the consent of those you deal with, but you're not so fussed about how. Any form of manipulation is fair game. With your help, I could have turned any given person into my willing slave, and you would have _let me_. You were right – I'm no saint. In the past, I've acted in ways that I later regretted, and I'll… I'll probably do it again. You, though – you would take away every restraint I still have. I've seen where that path leads. This world doesn't need a second Haruhi, especially not one controlled by you."

His captor considered this. "Well, I'm sorry you think that way. Can't say I didn't consider the possibility, though – thought you might be too weak to handle a bit of real power. Kyon, meet your new little brother."

The air shimmered again, and Kyon found himself looking at… himself, in a slightly battered North High School uniform.

"The wonders of Warp-powered cloning, eh?" Shinji said conversationally. "This charming chap will be filling in for you while we take you back to our place for a bit of… re-education. Kyon Junior, say hi to the nice young man."

The clone stepped up to him and sank his fingers into his skull. There was no pain – just an odd, tingling sensation. Eventually, the fingers were withdrawn, and the bizarre apparition stared at his progenitor for a moment.

"These memories… what a dull, repressed little child you are, brother," he said at last. "Such a waste of your true potential."

Kyon snarled, and was met with a mocking smile.

"You done, kid?" Shinji asked the clone. "Good. Run along and play now. Time's a-wasting."

"Of course, Lord Tzintchi." As he reached the door, he turned back to Kyon. ""Never fear, brother. I shall endeavour to rectify your mistakes."

The student gazed levelly at his captors. "They'll know. He won't be able to hide what he is forever."

"You're probably right," Shinji agreed. "Good thing he won't have to. Time flows differently between the dimensions – you could spend months as our guest, and only a few days might pass here. Speaking of, let's get going. No sense in hanging around."

A choking, invisible pressure wrapped itself around Kyon's neck, and he was lifted off the ground, the chains shattering beneath him. Darkness closed in around the edges of his vision, and he lost consciousness.

* * *

The gods gathered around his unconscious body.

"Was the Darth Vader shtick really necessary?" Asukhon asked. "You could have killed him."

Tzintchi shrugged. "One has to bring a certain measure of style to these matters, yes? Besides, who's the experienced telekinetic here? He was never in any danger. In fact, given his… special properties, I doubt that he would have died even if I wanted him to."

Mislaato raised an eyebrow. "It's confirmed, then?"

"Oh, yes. You saw the readings – Haruhi may be the unquestioned god of this realm, but who do you think created it in the first place? It's rather unlikely that she imprisoned _herself_, no? I suspect that our pal Kyon will come in handy for rather more than pacifying some brat of a godling."

Asukhon perked up. "Does that mean what I think it means?"

He smiled thinly. "Yep. No restraints. Though I dislike unnecessary cruelty-"

She sniggered. "Liar."

"-the stakes are simply too high for us to worry about the wellbeing of one person," he finished. "Right. Home we go, then."

There was one last shimmer, and all four gods and their captive vanished as if they had never existed.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, the butterfly has flapped its wings in a most definitive manner. To be honest, it was this chapter in the original story that rather irritated me. I just couldn't see Kyon going along with the gods' offer, and it didn't help that by that point I was kind of itching for _something_ to not immediately go the smug gits' way, either. Still, they do have the Old Gods on their side, and that means contingency plans out the wazoo. Let's see just how well they work out, hmm?

See you next week!


	7. Settling In

**6. Settling In**

Kyon awoke in what he slowly realised was a four-poster bed. There were no windows, but the room was softly-lit by cunningly-concealed lights in the walls and ceiling. The rest of it was similarly opulent – the bedside tables and cabinets were made of ornately carved mahogany, and book-cases lined those walls that were otherwise unoccupied.

He got up, took a moment to admire the silk pyjamas, and set off to explore the rest of the apartment. It was likewise well-appointed – the bath was huge, with a terrifying array of mysterious nozzles, whilst the sofas in the main lounge looked so comfortable that they practically exerted their own gravitic field. There were only two indicators that this place was a prison – the thick apartment door with the large flap halfway up, and the little spherical drone that he found hovering in the kitchen, which greeted him with a cascade of eye-hurting symbols, and proceeded to follow him around from then onwards.

After a bit more poking around and a couple of fruitless attempts to open the door, he sat back down on the bed and opened one of the books – _The Prisoner of Zenda_, which someone had obligingly translated into Japanese, and which he rapidly put down once he realised that (a) it was providing uncomfortably ironic commentary on his own situation, and (b) that was probably why the gods had put it there. Eventually, though, he picked it up again. It wasn't as if he had much else to do.

Over the next couple of days, life in the gilded cage developed into a regular routine. Three times a day, the guard outside would open the flap and pass through a tray of food. It was simple stuff (surprisingly so given his surroundings, like a favourite back-home recipe for the nouveau riche), but nourishing, and the waste disposal unit in the kitchen dealt with what was left over. He wasn't sure he wanted to know _how_, though – there was a weird chomping noise that came from it whenever he pushed the tray down.

The drone proved to be entirely invulnerable to his assaults – all he got out of it was some bruised knuckles and broken furniture. These vanished the next morning, though – again, he doubted he wanted to know the details of that.

On the third day, he tried to start a conversation with the guard.

"Umm... hi. My name's Kyon. What's yours?"

Silence.

"Ah. I see. I'm a student at North High School, in Nishinomiya City, on the shore of Osaka Bay in Japan. Do you have a Nishinomiya here? I would have thought so."

More silence.

"Well, I suppose Kyon isn't my real name. More of a nickname. It sort of stuck, though. I really can't imagine being called anything else."

The silence continued.

"I wonder how my friends are doing? That is to say, my fellow-supervisors. Dealing with Haruhi is a full-time job. Literally."

Yet more silence.

"You wouldn't know about Haruhi, would you? She's this girl I met... must have been a year ago, now. Roped me into this weird club, the SOS Brigade, along with a couple of others. No, I'm not going to dignify that acronym by explaining what it stands for. She's... not exactly normal, you see. And by 'not exactly normal', I mean 'borderline-sociopathic'. Sees people as _things_. At least, she used to. She's getting a bit better these days. Still not exactly an easy person to be around, though. Of course, I would have dropped the whole thing like a live grenade first chance I got, but joy of joys, it turns out that she's a deity-level reality-warper. Could rewrite the entire universe without even knowing she was doing it. The Brigade turned into a way to keep her distracted, to prevent her from causing too much damage. We could have told her what she was, I suppose, but well... she's Haruhi. I don't think she's ready for that sort of thing. I don't think _anyone_ is."

He wondered if the gods were listening, but decided it didn't matter. He wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know.

"One thing I will say, though – being with Haruhi is never dull." He smiled. "She's always cooking up some crazy scheme that'll likely get some or all of us exhausted, hurt, or otherwise in trouble, but never, ever bored. We may spend our entire lives rigging sports matches, solving staged murder mysteries, and fighting off overgrown virtual camel crickets, but... sometimes, it can be fun. Not that I'd ever let her know that, though. I'd be up to my armpits in physics-violating weirdness in no time flat. More so."

The drone buzzed a little too close, and he idly swatted it away.

"Then there's the rest of the Brigade. None of them are exactly normal, either. Haruhi probably had something to do with that, whether she knows it or not. Nagato – Yuki Nagato, to be precise – is an artificial human, a living interface for this alien computer-thing called the Integrated Data Entity. She's quiet, she hardly ever shows anything even resembling emotion, and she once rebuilt the universe into some sort of present for me (long story), but... I trust her. When Nagato's around, you know everything's going to be all right. Stick her in a library, though, and you'd best wave goodbye, because she's not coming out for several hours. I swear, it's like an addiction."

Again, silence.

"Then there's Miss Asahina. Sweet, innocent, a real angel. She's a time-traveller, sent from the future as an observer. Unfortunately, Haruhi decided she'd make the perfect club mascot, and has this bad habit of using her as her personal plaything. Honestly, I don't know how she puts up with it."

The clock on the mantelpiece, he saw, was slightly out of sync. Sometimes it ticked slightly too slow, sometimes too fast. Now he'd noticed it, it was really rather distracting.

"The last is Itsuki Koizumi. He's an esper, tasked with defeating the giant monsters Haruhi spawns whenever she's frustrated, depressed, or just plain bored. Sounds like a superhero, right? Not exactly. You know how it is when someone's perfectly nice, but just sets your teeth on edge for some reason? That's Koizumi all over. He always stands a bit too close, smiles a bit too often, and has this weird sense of humour. He'll talk your ear off about some obscure philosophical concept, then dismiss the entire thing _just_ when you're starting to get creeped out. Matter of fact, I think he'd get on pretty well with your gods. That, or they'd do the multiverse a favour and pull something horrible on each other."

He sighed.

"No, no, I suppose he isn't _that_ bad, really. I just wish he'd back off sometimes, is all. Hah, look at me, rambling on like this. You're probably not even listening, are you? I'm sure issuing prison guards with earplugs is somewhere on the Evil Overlord List. Guess I'm just compensating for not having Haruhi yapping in my ear twenty-four-seven. Never know what you've got 'til it's gone, huh? Anyway, we should do this again some time. Same time, same place? Think my schedule's pretty clear for the next couple of days. Or months. See you."

As he got up from the sofa, he heard a voice from beyond the door.

"My name's Maria Vargas," the guard said in heavily-accented Japanese. "Pleased to meet you, Kyon."

Kyon grinned. "Pleased to meet you too, Maria."

* * *

The day after that, Tzintchi paid a visit. He was in his accustomed human form, complete with the omnipresent blue suit. He didn't bother with the door, instead appearing out of thin air with the now-familiar shimmer.

"Morning, Kyon. Hope you're enjoying your stay. I apologise for not popping over earlier – pan-universal conquest is pretty time-consuming."

Kyon's response was succinct and obscene.

"Oh, don't be like that. See, I thought that you might want some questions answered. Why we're doing this, for a start."

"This is going to be more of that 'good interdimensional citizens' bullshit, isn't it?"

Tzintchi laughed. "Nah, I respect you too much for that, kid. Tell you what; let's go for eighty percent truth and twenty percent bullshit. I'll even let you figure out which bits are which. Come on, it'll be fun!"

"I don't have much choice in this, do I?"

"Well, I suppose I _could_ just bugger off and practice with the telekinetic one-man orchestra, but that'd be a waste of both our time. Speaking as a surface-level mind-reader, I can see your curiosity bubbling away in that head of yours, and I'm offering you a prime opportunity to let it out. Fire away, kid."

"Fine, then. What exactly is your goal here? Conquest just for the hell of it seems a little too clichéd."

Tzintchi nodded. "Sharp as always. I told you that we hijacked Third Impact, the cataclysm that would have wiped out the human race, becoming gods in the process. What I didn't tell you was _how_. We had outside help, you see. An entire pantheon of gods from the distant future had travelled back in time and shaped events so that we would succeed. We were the product of an experiment centuries in the making, imbued with their power and their wisdom to rule over humanity. Why, do you ask? Quite simple. The future they had come from was _doomed_. An ancient threat had arisen, the C'tan. Soul-eaters. Star-vampires. Alien gods with an undying mechanical army at their beck and call. The most terrible threat encountered in this or any other reality. The gods' plan was to let them win early and prevent the conflict from escalating, whilst forging us into a weapon to strike at their unprotected backs. That's why we began to explore other universes – we needed equipment and allies with which to oppose the C'tan wherever they might appear. Quite apart from the literal divine mandate, they're just too dangerous to ignore. Warp help us if they ever figure out how to traverse dimensions."

The student processed this. "I... see."

"You're wondering why we use the methods we do, aren't you? Put simply, it's in our nature. The gods who empowered us were not pleasant beings, Kyon. They were formed from the darkest recesses of the human psyche, and it is that power which we wield. Tzintchi, god of ambition. Asukhon, goddess of rage. Reigle, goddess of despair. Mislaato, goddess of lust. Emotion is our medium, and a potent medium it is indeed."

Kyon shook his head. "Sorry, but I'm not buying it. How is emotion fundamentally evil?"

"It isn't, in moderation. It's when it's pushed to extremes that the fun starts. Love becomes obsession, hope becomes megalomania, and righteous fury becomes murderous wrath. The more we exert our powers, the worse things get."

"So haven't you considered... I don't know... _limiting_ yourselves? Letting other people help out?"

"Considered, and rejected. We have been betrayed and manipulated for most of our mortal lives, if not all. Now we have real, world-changing power, we have no intention of subordinating ourselves to others ever again. We do try to exercise a measure of damage-limitation, though – that's the other reason that we prefer to operate behind the scenes, you see, and we prefer to only unleash our true might in the most exceptional circumstances, or when the targets, frankly, deserve everything coming to them."

The drone pulled up next to them, and projected what looked like some sort of star-map, along with a series of intelligence articles.

"This is the Federation," Tzintchi explained. "It's a reasonably sophisticated galaxy-spanning civilisation in another dimension, most notable for its employment of the so-called 'Prime Directive', which forbade interference with the natural development of any species or similar below a certain tech-level. When our scouts discovered one of their outposts, they had condemned millions to death through inaction. They had the technology of hundreds of star systems at their disposal, and they did _nothing_ with it."

For the first time, Kyon saw real anger in the god's eyes.

"A few surgical strikes taught them the error of their ways. I believe they are currently undergoing an ideological civil war. Maybe it will wake them up a little – they were _far_ too complacent."

"So... you attempted to invalidate their non-interference policy by showing them precisely the sort of damage a technologically-superior civilisation could inflict?" Kyon remarked sarcastically. "Genius, Ikari, pure genius."

Tzintchi said nothing.

"Look, I think I see where you're coming from. You want to save the multiverse, but your methods are rather limited by personal issues and problems with your abilities. Nevertheless, you're trying to make the best of it, in your own way. It's logical. It's fairly consistent."

The god smiled. "I'm glad you think so."

"That still doesn't change the fact that you have to be stopped, though."

"Oh?"

"Do you seriously think I'd support a bunch of lying, emotionally-damaged deities as they try to turn reality itself into their personal playground? If there's one thing I've learned from living with Haruhi, it's that _when the gods are assholes, mortals suffer_. I'd be fine with you carrying out your juvenile vigilante fantasies if nobody else was affected, but that isn't the case. Not only are you letting your paranoid delusions affect the fate of trillions, but you're setting yourselves up as judges, jury and executioners of all you survey, enforcing your twisted ideals no matter how much blood must be spilt. You- _mmf_!"

Kyon suddenly found that he could no longer open his mouth. Tzintchi checked his watch theatrically.

"Sorry, kid, I'd love to stay, but I'm afraid I've got more pressing matters to attend to than listening to a schoolboy rant straight out of an ethics textbook. Don't worry; I'll leave you a few friends to play with. Ta-ta."

He disappeared with a little wave. A moment later, the rest of the SOS Brigade appeared where he had stood. All of them were naked. All of them wore expressions of savage, inhuman delight. Kyon tried to flee to the bathroom, but found the door inexplicably locked. He backed up against a wall, holding a lamp as a weapon, as the simulacra of his friends closed in.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, I said I'd be providing weekly updates, and so I am. Better yet, this one's a double-bill, you lucky people.

'When the gods are assholes, mortals suffer'. It's a quote from the original story, Thousand Shinji, which kept popping up in my head whilst I was reading The Open Door. I kept feeling that it was a lesson the protagonists had rather forgotten by the sequel, and I wanted to write something exploring the reasons for and consequences of that. Thus, The Doorstop.

For those who hadn't read those stories, and I'm sure there's plenty, I hope that this chapter started to give you a better idea of just what the hell's going on in this fic. I'm a Steven Erikson fan, you see, and it's from him that I picked up the unfortunate habit of littering my exposition and background all over the story rather than dumping it all in at the earliest opportunity. I don't do 'As you know, Bob' conversations if I can avoid it, you see. Hope it doesn't drive you _too_ far up the wall.


	8. New Friends

**7. New Friends**

Kyon exited the bathroom. He'd washed for over an hour, but still didn't feel entirely clean. He looked down, and saw that the morning meal had arrived.

"I gave you a little extra," Maria said apologetically. "Are you all right?"

"As well as could be expected, thanks." His jaw was still a little stiff.

"What he did was... unnecessary."

"Yeah, your gods seem to be big fans of 'unnecessary'," he replied sourly. "How did you end up working here?"

"It's a long story."

"I've got time."

So she told him.

The gods' ascension had not been unchallenged. Those nations distant from the site of Third Impact had only seen a stain on the surface of the Earth, gradually expanding with a horde of twisted once-humans at its forefront. It was no surprise that some resisted. Maria had been seventeen years old when the legions of the gods attacked her native Brazil, watching with her family as explosions illuminated the landscape and daemons soared across the sky.

After the wars, those people from the conquered countries were formally welcomed into the service of Chaos. Informally, though, they were second-class citizens, and they knew it. Driven by pressures both external and internal, they tended to gravitate towards the dirty, dangerous jobs, particularly those involving the thousands of factories and industrial plants that formed the backbone of the new regime's mighty war machine. Her parents had died when she was twenty, caught in an accident on one of the new orbitals. An errant piece of space-debris had smashed through a cargo hangar, sucking out the oxygen within and sentencing the workers there to a quick, unpleasant death by asphyxiation.

Maria, meanwhile, had entered the army, which had some of the best opportunities for advancement in the post-Third Impact world. It had taken a phenomenal amount of dedication and willpower, but she had eventually managed to be awarded the honour of a post in the Palace Guard. It had been a good life, good enough to make her forget what the gods had done to her and those around her.

Then the prisoners had started to arrive.

They had come from all walks of life – soldiers, scholars, even ordinary civilians – and the ways in which they had been broken were equally varied. The Palace of the Gods became another factory – one of minds rather than machines, dedicated to producing useful tools for the will of Chaos. Maria had seen dozens pass through the room which Kyon currently inhabited, all of them transformed into loyal servants by rage, pleasure, ambition and despair.

"Do you understand?" she finished. "Your fate was sealed from the moment they took you. All I can do is make your last few days of freedom a little more comfortable."

"Freedom?" Kyon asked, with less sarcasm and more fear than he'd hoped to muster. "This is freedom?"

"Comparatively, yes. They'll treat you kindly, in their way, once it's done, and I'm sure they'll believe they're doing you a favour. Make no mistake, though – you'll simply be a vessel of their will. No more, no less."

He was silent. There was nothing he really _could_ say.

Eventually, he got up and went to the book-case – the composer (whoever they had been) seemed to have a particular fondness for nineteenth-century British novelists for some reason. After a few attempts to get through a particularly intractable Dickens book – thankfully less relevant than his last choice of reading matter – he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Later, he wondered if Maria had slipped something into his food to facilitate this – if she had, he was grateful.

* * *

For the next few days, they exchanged stories of their respective lives, not to mention general gossip. Maria, improbably, turned out to be something of a movie buff, if one of rather eclectic taste, defending _Citizen Kane_ and _Plan Nine from Outer Space_ with equal fervour. Something as bad as the latter, she claimed, _had_ to be art.

She seemed just as eager to talk as he was – Kyon doubted that standing guard on the outside of a prison ad infinitum was much more interesting than being on the inside. He did wonder, though, whether this lax discipline was a sign of weakness on the gods' part or an expression of confidence in their subversive talents. Most likely the latter. It wasn't an encouraging thought.

Asukhon turned up shortly afterwards. Unlike Tzintchi, she didn't bother with a human form, instead appearing as a towering, crimson-skinned female figure clad in form-fitting bronze armour that Kyon suspected was rather more practical than it looked. Her hair was of the same colour as said armour, and enormous horns curled from her forehead.

_Guess they've decided to abandon subtlety,_ he thought.

"So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" he asked. _Still got some fuel left in the sarcasm tanks – good._

She smiled, revealing far too many teeth. "I wanted to go over a few things with you – specifically, how you're going to get broken."

"Oh, good. Can we schedule it a bit later? I've got a pretty busy timetable – can't miss my daily staring-at-a-wall session. Very important." _Hey, if they're going to torture me anyway..._

She didn't respond, but simply gestured the drone over. It flashed up another series of images, this time of a group of serious-looking men. None of them were younger than their mid-forties.

"These are the people responsible for Second and Third Impact."

Another gesture, and the images changed. A couple of video feeds were added to the mix, as well.

"This is what we did to them."

Kyon tried not to throw up, and barely succeeded.

"Amongst our secondary objectives when exploring other dimensions," she continued, "was locating and capturing the various incarnations of these men. Once we had done so, we got... creative."

The images changed again. And again. He tried to turn away, but something held him in place. He wasn't sure whether it was the goddess's deliberate influence or his own fascinated horror.

"As you can see, we learned a lot from these little sessions. We'll start you off with the basics, then move on to more advanced techniques if you continue to prove intractable. I've never worked on someone with your... abilities before, so this should be an interesting experience for me as well."

Kyon mustered his last few shreds of defiance. "Glad to hear it. Incidentally, how many men, women, and children did it take to perfect those techniques? I mean, if you're going to pull the whole 'sadistic torture technician' shtick, you might as well go all the way."

It was a cheap shot, but it was hard to worry about the finer feelings of someone who apparently saw peeling off all your skin as a warm-up act, particularly given what her companion had already done. That said, he was surprised at the severity of her reaction. She stared at him silently for a few moments, her expression showing the very particular pain of someone who has just had an old wound reopened.

"No," she said softly. "No children. We don't hurt children."

She turned around and walked out, her face set back in that broad, malicious grin, though now it looked a little strained.

"Best practice your grovelling, Kyon. You'll need it in the weeks ahead."

* * *

Asukhon strode through the palace corridors, quietly seething. _Damn that little piece of shit for getting under my skin..._

"Opinion?" Tzintchi asked.

"Honestly, I still have difficulty believing that that runt's a god, even a dormant one," she replied. "My guess is he's going to snap like a rotten branch. Speaking of rotten, why isn't Rei handling this? I'd have thought it was right up her street."

"Oh, she's waiting in the wings," he assured her. "It's just that if he doesn't snap, I know few better people for pissing him off. Bribery and appeals to sympathy won't work anymore – he's convinced that we're the bad guys, and we might as well live up to it. More than one way to corrupt someone, right?"

Asukhon smiled. "Well, it _is_ my speciality..."

"Too right. I've still got the mental scars from our first meeting."

"Hey, _you_ were the one who used your mindsight on me while I was getting changed!"

"Dearest, you asked a _teenage boy_ not to peek. What did you expect?"

"That you'd do it in a way where I could catch you at it! I swear, sorcery sucks the fun out of _everything_."

"Ah. My apologies for denying you one of your therapeutic daily rants, then. I promise I'll make it up to you later."

"You'd better. Hrm, probably time for a repeat performance of that stunt you pulled with the reshaped daemons. Which one would you suggest?"

"He showed a particular negative reaction to the male last time." Reigle commented.

"Thanks, Rei. Latent homophobia, eh? Useful. Itsuki Koizumi it is, then."

She drew a couple of glowing symbols in the air and gave her hearing a quick boost. About a minute later, she detected screams coming from the guest quarter.

* * *

When Kyon awoke next, it was in a hospital bed. His body ached all over, and a brief spot of probing revealed that his head was thickly wrapped in bandages. He couldn't remember much of what had happened after Asukhon left, which was something of a relief. The bits he _did_ remember were bad enough.

Another blessing was that he still had control of all his limbs. After a requisite few moments of gloomy, ceiling-gazing contemplation, he awkwardly extricated himself from the bedsheets, glad that whoever had put him here hadn't felt the need for an intravenous drip or something similarly ghastly. Standing up proved inordinately difficult – sharp twinges of pain coursed through his legs, and he almost fell over twice. Eventually, though, he managed it, thanks largely to the assistance of a bedside table.

He hobbled over to the curtain surrounding the bed and yanked it aside, curious as to his surroundings. The ward turned out to be an enormous ring-shaped affair with curtained beds lining both the outside and inside walls. White-uniformed nurses patrolled in between, some of them moving in ways that suggested something other than standard bipedal locomotion.

There was a series of muffled _whumps_ as some sort of pole impacted against the 'walls' of the fabric cubicle next to him, clearly signalling for attention. Curious, he opened that curtain as well and peered inside.

The bed's resident turned out to be a little girl. She was wired up to an impressive collection of monitors, fluid dispensers, and other, stranger medical dispensers, her bright red hair an odd contrast to the clinical sterility all around her. The pole turned out to be a steel crutch which she held with one hand, and lowered as she registered her visitor.

"Oh, hello," she said with a smile of warm, childish innocence. "Are you one of my new friends' guests?"

Kyon blinked. "'New friends'?"

"Papa Tzintchi. Mamas Reigle, Mislaato, and Asukhon, though she's more of a big sister, really. They've been very nice to me – the people here work for them, you see. My name's Vita. What's yours?"

"Kyon." He attempted a formal bow, and nearly had an unscheduled appointment with the floor yet again. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Vita."

Vita giggled, but it didn't reach her eyes, which were deep blue, strangely elongated, and positively ancient-looking compared to the rest of her.

"So, how did you end up here?" he asked.

Her forehead crinkled. "They said I was hurt in a big fight a long way away. Hurt badly. I don't remember it really. What I do remember is that they took me here and put me back together. They talk to me, you know. They tell me all kinds of stories. Soon I'm going to be big and strong just like Asukhon, and I'm going to fight their enemies."

There was something about the simple pride with which she said it that chilled Kyon to the bone.

"So, what about you, Kyon?"

"Me? Oh, the gods brought me here too," he said truthfully if not honestly. "I think they thought they were doing the right thing there, too."

She studied his face. "Are you all right? You look a little bit sad."

"Oh, it's nothing. I'm just a long way from my friends, is all, and I've had a bad few days."

"Oh, I see. I miss my friends too, but the gods tell me they'll come soon enough. Maybe yours will do the same."

"Maybe so." _Dear Lord, I hope not._

There was the sound of footsteps, plus a bizarre squelching noise. As they faded, Vita turned to Kyon. Her face suddenly didn't look remotely child-like.

"Are they still watching?" she asked in a low voice.

He sighed. "Probably."

A sour expression. "Figures. Name's Lieutenant Vita of the Time-Space Administration Bureau. I'd offer you my service number, but I always did have trouble remembering it. Let me guess – you're stuck in the same mess as me."

"If by 'mess' you mean 'capture and torture by insane extradimensional deities', then I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head."

"Ugh. Charming. Thought you didn't look like the type to get those normally." She indicated the bandages. "No torture here, but they've been feeding me these chemicals. Cloud your mind, make you want to give in... and they change you. On the inside. When I came in, I had at least three internal organs missing. Now they're back, and I should probably be happier than I am. They get you, kid. They get you mind, body, and soul."

"Yeah, I got the full presentation. Word of advice – if they offer you roast pork, _don't eat it_."

"Pork? If only. Nah – they've got me on liquids, and I'm pretty sure it's not for medical reasons. Not the medical reasons I _arrived_ with, anyway." She shuddered. "Call me Little Miss Obvious, but this place is _fucked up_, kid."

"You seem to be doing all right, though."

"Only because I've had practice. Believe me, getting through the fluffy pink clouds isn't easy, and it's getting harder every day. They- _shit_!"

More footsteps approached. Vita urgently beckoned him closer.

"Stahlwind B-2, got it? That's my reset code. Stahlwind B-2. If they break me, you've got to bring me back. I can't let Hayate see me as one of these things' pets..."

Kyon was about to ask for clarification when one of the nurses came through the curtain. She was a large, matronly woman with what Maria had told him was Mislaato's rune tattooed on her forehead. Her left arm strongly resembled the tentacle of an octopus.

"Vita, dear, it's time for your lunch, and-" She stopped as she saw Kyon. "Oh, I see you've been making friends! What a coincidence – I was intending to pop by your bed as well, Master Kyon. Suppose this saves me a bit of effort, eh? Anyway, you're clear to leave, though we'll need you back here in a couple of days to take the bandages off."

The tentacle reached inside her coat, and retrieved a small card box.

"If the pain bothers you, take a couple of these. Should clear it right up."

Kyon took the pills, and retreated with as much speed as he could tactfully manage, wiping off the slime on his pyjama leg. He turned round, and saw that the woman was now busy breastfeeding Vita. The rune on her forehead glowed, and unnaturally thick purple veins pulsated across her skin.

_Stahlwind B-2. Right._ He remembered the look in the girl's eyes as he had left. _They don't hurt children, huh?_

The drone was waiting for him at the entrance to the ward. When he approached it, it began to drift away, the symbols it projected indicating that he should follow in a way that entirely bypassed the language centres of his brain. His legs were already in motion before the rest of his body had a chance to catch up.

At the end of the corridor, he stopped and looked around him. Nothing.

"I know you can hear me," he said, "so I want to ask you a question. Why didn't you do that to me? Your current method seems rather crude in comparison. Why sophisticated mind-rape for one and the medieval treatment for the other?"

"You know, that's a very good question," Asukhon's voice replied from nowhere. "Why don't you see if you can figure it out? Tell you what, we'll make it a test. You get it right, you get a cookie... No, no, I can't do this twisty shit. That's Shinji's job. Simple answer, Kyon? We do it because it's _fun_. Speaking of, the god of your dimension just got laid. Wanna look?"

The drone's projector opened a new feed, showing a hotel room rather similar in design to the one that Kyon currently inhabited. Clothes were scattered across the floor and two naked bodies moved against each other on the bed, shining dully with sweat.

He closed his eyes. "Turn it off."

"You sure? I mean, it looks like we're about to get to the good bit, and-"

"I SAID TURN IT OFF!" It was almost a scream.

"Pff, fine, fine..."

The projection vanished.

"You know, you're really not that cooperative, Kyon," Asukhon chided him. "Think it'd help if we brought along Mikuru to encourage you? Or maybe Yuki? I know Rei's been making some serious advances with biotech computer viruses, and she's just been _itching_ for a test subject."

Ice ran down Kyon's spine. "_You will not hurt them_."

"Eh. We'll see. Sweet dreams, Kyon."

The drone buzzed away again, and he stumped after it, his shoulders shaking. He tried to forget the look he had seen on Haruhi's face. He tried to forget the look he had seen on his _own_ face.

* * *

Far away, in the personal quarters of the gods, Asukhon leaned back in her chair. "Boy, he is _steamed_."

"Exemplary work, my dear," Tzintchi commented. "I knew I could rely on you."

"Did anyone catch what Vita said to him?" Mislaato asked.

He shook his head. "No. She threw up some sort of interference. Most irritating. Whatever the case, you need to step up the process where she's concerned. Using her was a calculated risk – we already know that our unconsciously-deific buddy has something of a thing about protecting girls. We can't afford her to be a potential spanner in our works any longer, though."

The goddess of lust nodded. "You won't get any argument from me. Asuka, I might need your help with that – she seems to gravitate most towards your side."

"On it. Hey, Shinji, wouldn't it be nice if we actually _could_ carry out that procedure on the runt?"

"It would certainly be easier," he agreed. "That's gods for you, I suppose – always making your lives a little bit harder."

That got a few chuckles.

"We'll let him stew for a few days, maybe poke him once or twice, and then darling Maria can reel him in. I hate to tempt fate like this, but everything seems to be going according to plan. Orgy at eleven, people – don't be late."

"Isn't it my job to organise those?" Mislaato objected.

"Yes, but you've been working yourself to the bone lately. I thought I'd give you a bit of a treat, let you take the load off your feet."

She smiled. "I _knew_ there was a reason I married you."

As the others wandered off to engage in their own activities, Tzintchi stared at the ceiling with his many eyes.

_He could have played nice and gone along with us, but he didn't. It's the little sod's own silly fault, really._

* * *

By the time Kyon arrived back at his quarters, his rage had focused into something cold and hard, like a knife in his brain. He wasn't a naturally violent young man, but if Tzintchi had stood before him at that moment, he would have happily scraped the god's smug smile off his face. With his thumbs, if necessary.

Maria gave him a concerned look. She was pretty much what he had expected – a scarred, tough-looking woman in her mid-thirties who wore bulky red-and-black body armour that straddled the fine line between decorativeness and functionality.

"What happened?"

"I'd _really_ prefer not to talk about it." He sighed. "Maria, I don't know how much more of this I can take."

She dropped her voice. "I understand. This has gone far too far already. Check your next meal tray – there'll be something on it I think you'll find useful."

"What about your job?"

"Watching students get tortured isn't all it's cracked up to be. This place is locked down too tight to escape, but I'd like to express my disapproval to the gods in person – if you're interested, that is."

He grinned. "Count me in."

"Good. Remember – dinner tray, in the dessert bowl."

The next hour was slow agony. He tried to flick through a few books, but none of them managed to engage him. Instead, he spent most of it fidgeting on the sofa, staring at his watch.

Eventually, the moment he had been waiting for came. The flap on the door rattled, and a simple wooden tray bedecked with dinnerware lowered itself to the floor. He rushed over and eagerly tore open the foil covering on the dessert bowl.

Inside was the tiniest gun he had seen in his life. The grip was barely large enough for him to fit two of his fingers around it, and the barrel was shaped like a miniature syringe. He glared accusingly at the door.

"Is this some sort of joke?"

A laugh from the other side. "Oh yes, but not the sort you're thinking of. We call it the 'Noisy Cricket'. Don't test it out if you value your ceiling – it pulls up a bit. It might take me a little while to arrange a breakout, but don't worry. I'll contact you in a few days."

Kyon finished his meal, and went to bed, the miniscule gun tucked under his pillow. It took some time, but eventually he fell into an erratic, troubled sleep... though not until he had hurled the room's copy of _The Prisoner of Zenda_ into the waste disposal unit's waiting maw.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Hey, they're the heirs to the Chaos Gods. You were expecting _nice_? Oh, and word of advice - this isn't one of those stories where villains never lie. You have been warned.

Vita was another character I just couldn't see going along with the Chaotic agenda as cheerfully as she did in the original story, and especially not just because they were being _polite_ about the icky, disturbingly Freudian brainwashing. I mean, come _on_. Would it work? Maybe. Would she be _happy_ about it? Hell, no.

Join me again next week, in which we encounter tea breaks, alien abductions, and fancy sunglasses as the gods' scenario slowly heads out the proverbial window.

Thanks for reading!


	9. Breakthrough

**8. Breakthrough**

The _Eventide_ had been patrolling the outside of the Wall for weeks, its sensors powered up to the limits of their design tolerance. Nobody wanted to suggest to Hayate or Fate that they might be pursuing a fool's errand.

They had been used – Nanoha saw that now. Precia had told them that the forces of Chaos could control the Warp, but they hadn't put two and two together. The suspiciously well-timed warp storms couldn't have been a coincidence; they had been dragooned into participating in a war they had no stake in, and then unceremoniously kicked out once they had outlived their usefulness.

She remembered the last proper conversation she had had with Fate. It had been a day after the disastrous expedition down to the unknown planet, and her partner was still in one of the infirmary beds, groggy from Shamal's sedatives.

"Nanoha..." she had asked, "where's Alicia? I want to talk to her."

Exactly what Nanoha hadn't wanted to hear.

"Fate," she said gently, "they did something to her. What we saw wasn't your sister, not any more. Maybe she's still in there, buried deep, but Fate... I saw her eat a man's soul, right in front of my eyes. It was... it was horrible."

Fate stared at her. "No..."

"I'm sorry, my love. I knocked her out, tried to get her out of there. I thought maybe the Bureau could help – we've dealt with this sort of thing before, though rarely this bad. Some soldiers ambushed us, though, and... I dropped her."

"You _dropped her_? You left my sister to those _creatures_?" Nanoha had never seen Fate so angry. Spots of red appeared on her pale face.

"There was nothing I could do!"

"Get out." It was said quietly, in a voice quavering with emotion.

"Fate, I-"

"_Get_. _Out_."

She had fled. In the past she had faced monsters, dark mages, and diabolical masterminds, but that look on her partner's face was the one thing she couldn't stand. Behind her, she heard weeping.

Since then, they had barely exchanged a dozen words with each other, and then mostly just acknowledgements of replacement at posts. Nanoha slept in the main barracks now, along with the rest of the forwards.

She walked onto the bridge. Hayate was there as always, standing atop the command platform like a statue. There were dark rings around her eyes. Everyone else was busy at their stations, very pointedly not making eye contact with each other.

A movement caught her eye. The sensors officer, another Earthborn with a vaguely Eastern European name nobody could pronounce, had raised his head, his face faintly glowing with cagy excitement.

"Colonel, you're not going to believe this," he said shakily, "but I think I've just found another entrance to the Wall."

Hayate blinked. "I'm sorry, you _what_?"

"It's an old wound," he explained. "There's even some stratified scar tissue around it, like it's been sealed and reopened a couple of times. The dimensional space around it's pretty calm, too, though I think we won't be able to get in much further than the first universe inside. Given that that's where the disturbance seems to be coming from, though, I'd still say it's worth a look."

"Understood. Helm, take us in."

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

The excitement began to spread. Even Nanoha felt it. The thought that their search might not be in vain...

Hayate stepped down from the platform, almost falling over. Signum rushed to her side, and she draped a grateful arm over her bodyguard's shoulder.

"Sensors, see if you can pick up any more data. Lieutenant Rostov, you have the bridge again. As for me, I'm getting some rest."

* * *

The transition into realspace was pleasingly uneventful. The _Eventide_ slid into orbit around what was clearly a parallel Earth with a minimum of fuss, cut its emissions, and went into low-visibility mode. The bridge was just as crowded as it had been when they discovered the daemon-world, if not more so. Everyone wanted to see this.

"The primary source of the disturbance is Nishinomiya City, on the south coast of Japan." Hayate explained. "For the record, we tapped into local communications, and that's what they call it too. Makes things a lot easier for us, I will say. Even the street plans are pretty much the same as our own version. We'll be sending in a small team to the city perimeter – our objective is North High School, which is... well, pretty much where you'd expect it to be."

An image flashed up on the main viewer of a large, walled school facility built on a slight rise, a long path leading up to it on one side.

"Signum and Nanoha have volunteered for the mission. You'll be going in undercover, you two, so that means Agito won't be accompanying you – sorry, Agito, but you're barred from covert-ops until I can be sure you aren't going to accidentally burn down someone's house again."

"It was only the one time!" the tiny Unison Device grumbled, rather undermining her point with a petulant burst of flame.

"Anyway," Hayate continued, ignoring her, "we'll pull you out at even the _slightest_ whiff of trouble. I am _not_ going to have a repeat performance of last time. Is that understood?"

Both women nodded.

"Good. Belay callsign on an evacuation is 'Reinforce', but you'd best have a _very_ good reason for using it. Transport in twenty. Dismissed."

As they headed to the transport chamber, Nanoha turned to Signum.

"How's she holding up?" she asked quietly.

"Not well. She misses Vita a lot."

"I think we all do." She gave an encouraging smile. "Don't worry – we'll find her."

"Of course." The tall woman lapsed back into her habitual stony silence.

A few moments later, she glanced at Nanoha again. "Nanoha... you're a good friend to Hayate. Thank you for that."

The younger captain blushed with embarrassment and slight confusion. Signum wasn't prone to such outbursts.

"Um... not a problem." She desperately hunted for another discussion topic. "Oh, look, there's the chamber. Think we should get ready?"

"Indeed."

* * *

The transporter deposited them in the middle of a suburban neighbourhood, about half a kilometre from their objective. Hayate had used the MIS to create a temporary barrier around the area which should exclude any normal human witnesses. They deactivated their Barrier Jackets, changing into the ordinary civilian clothes they had elected to wear for the mission. Signum had had to borrow some from one of the galley staff, but neither that nor her bright pink hair managed to do much to prevent her from looking like the very epitome of middle-class respectability.

_OK, we're in,_ she informed Hayate. _You can drop the barrier now._

The sky abruptly went from grey to blue, and people appeared around them. Not many – they were, after all, in a residential area in the middle of the day – but enough to mark a significant change.

_Sensors, what does the situation look like from up there?_

_Pretty calm,_ he replied, _though the frequency of dimensional disturbances has risen over the past couple of weeks for some reason. Also changed location a bit – there was a big trail across Canada prior to the upswing. Centred back here now, mind._

_Anything more immediate?_

_No, nothing... wait, yes! Short-range teleport in your vicinity! Holy shit, they're heading straight for you. Transport, get them out of there n-_

The link cut off. Ahead of them, a single figure appeared at the end of the street and walked towards them, a bow-wave of silence spreading out before her. Nanoha reactivated her Barrier Jacket, not having to look to know that Signum had done the same. Their visitor was a short, grey-haired girl in a plain school uniform. Somehow, the utter, mundane unmemorability of her appearance made her all the more intimidating.

"Identify yourself!" Signum barked, pointing the tip of Laevantien's blade at her.

The stranger said nothing, merely regarding them with a level, expressionless gaze. She kept advancing, birdsong dying in the trees as she walked past. Nanoha levelled Raising Heart, mentally calculating range and trajectory.

"Miss, I apologise for my colleague's rudeness, but we really don't want any trouble here. Could you at least tell us your name, please?"

No response. The readings from her Intelligent Device spiked; this... person, whoever she was, was the source of a massive disturbance in the space-time continuum, and it was intensifying rapidly.

Just as she was about to open fire, the girl stopped, still calmly staring at them.

"You are not supposed to be here," she said in a flat monotone, and made a sharp gesture with her hand, muttering in an odd, stuttering voice that sounded very little like human speech.

Then there was only darkness.

* * *

"... And pop goes the disturbance," said the sensors officer resignedly. "We've lost the ground team's signals, chief."

Hayate gripped the edge of the command desk, her knuckles turning white.

_Not again..._

* * *

When Nanoha opened her eyes, it was in what looked suspiciously like an ordinary classroom, desks arranged into a single large table. At one end was a separate desk with a fancy-looking laptop and a couple of mysterious and frankly sinister ornaments.

_Not exactly standard prison design, is it?_ she commented to Signum.

_You would be surprised. Two centuries ago, Zafira and I were confined in a magically-reinforced tannery for a week. Not our finest hour._

"I apologise for the nature of your greeting," said the familiar robotic monotone from behind them, "but we have been given reason in the past to distrust entities from beyond our designated remit, especially in light of recent events. You are currently being stored in a secure artificial closed space whilst we access your vessel's data to verify your intent."

"'Artificial closed space'?" Signum enquired as they turned around.

"Yes. A technically inaccurate but broadly descriptive colloquial term would be 'pocket dimension'. We estimate this model to be both invisible and unreachable by your associates given their vessel's tech-level, though I will reiterate that this is a temporary measure pending threat assessment."

"So we can return to your planet if you decide that we are not a threat?" Nanoha asked.

"No. We will permit you to return to your vessel, but not to set foot on the planetary body designated 'Earth'. Please be advised that this is not intended as an insult to you and your kind in particular, but rather as an acknowledgement of the uniquely unstable situation on said planet, especially around the area you chose to land in."

"We detected a significant distortion in the fabric of space-time there," Nanoha said. "Does that have something to do with what you're talking about?"

"Yes. For several years now we have been engaged in damage-limitation protocols regarding a powerful unconscious reality-warper there. She is one source of the instability. The other is that our dimension has recently been invaded."

"Chaos," Signum growled.

"You are aware of them?" Was that a flicker of curiosity in that emotionless face?

"Yes. We have encountered them before. The encounter was... not friendly." Internally, Nanoha winced at herself. The girl's peculiar speech-patterns were infectious.

"Likewise. They are using our dimension as an access route for their armed forces, and have managed to subvert a significant number of key actors, including the reality-warper, Haruhi Suzumiya. This is why we contained you – we do not wish the invaders to gain further allies, and if you are not allies, revealing yourself to their agents would likely be extremely hazardous."

"Thank you for your concern," Nanoha replied politely, trying to keep the irony out of her voice. "Incidentally, might I ask who this 'we' is? Or _are_, I suppose."

"I am Yuki Nagato, a humanoid interface of the Data Integration Thought Entity. My purpose is to gather data on Earth in general and Haruhi Suzumiya in particular."

_A sentient program like me and my fellow knights?_ Signum wondered.

_That's my guess,_ Nanoha agreed. _Technobabble isn't exactly my strong suit._

Yuki tilted her head to one side for a moment.

"We have verified that you are not allied with the forces of Chaos," she said. "I shall provide you with access to your vessel."

More of that strange, bubbling code, and they felt the link to the _Eventide_ open once more. No sooner had they done so, though, than Hayate's voice came across. Telepathy made it difficult to hide one's emotions – she was clearly on the edge of panic.

_Nanoha, Signum, thank goodness we've found you. Don't worry – the transporter room's spun up and ready to go. What happened down there?_

_Wait, no!_ Nanoha yelled desperately. _Code Reinforce, I repeat, code Reinforce! They're not hostile!_

_Nanoha,_ Hayate said with strained patience, _they just kidnapped and imprisoned you._

_It was a misunderstanding! They thought we were agents of Chaos! Hayate, please, when was the last time I was wrong about something like this?_

_Well, there was that one time you swore blind that Inspector Acous's chocolate cake was safe to eat..._

_Oh, come on, how was I to know you were allergic to peanuts?_

_Wait, you mean you never illegally accessed the Section Six medical records? Arf told me it was an officer's rite of passage!_

_I think you've been spending far too much time around Arf of late, young lady._

A psychic sigh came from the other end. Nanoha was relieved to note that the panic had disappeared. _Fine, fine, I'll chat to these new friends of yours. I'm keeping the ship on full alert, though, is that understood?_

_Fine by me. Here's Raising Heart's recording, in case you need some time to prepare._

She turned back to Yuki, who regarded her with the same disconcerting patience as always. "My commanding officer wants to talk to you in person. Is that all right?"

"That is acceptable. I will summon emissaries of two other factions on this world. They will likely wish to be informed."

The 'emissaries' turned out to both be in their mid-teens, though this was something that one got used to as a member of the TSAB, particularly if one's first combat experience had been at age nine against an amorphous, befanged monstrosity trying to eat your face, as Nanoha's had. They were unceremoniously deposited from glowing portals in the air, and looked just as bemused as the two mages were.

One was a tall, handsome young man whose faint, slightly puzzled smile seemed to be more a permanent fixture of his face than a reaction to the events around him. The other was a short, doe-eyed, and improbably busty girl who gave an overall impression of a rabbit in the proverbial headlights.

Hayate's arrival was rather more dignified, calmly emerging from the spectacular light-show that was a magical transporter in action. Nanoha couldn't help noticing, though, that she had her Barrier Jacket activated and a blonde tint to her hair that signified she was interfaced with Reinforce Zwei. Given that her brand of magic was effectively useless in a confined space like this, it was probably just a psychological crutch.

_Bringing a nuke to a negotiation? Isn't that supposed to be my job?_ she thought with simultaneous amusement and worry. _Everybody's on edge here – probably me as well. No, wait, _definitely _me as well._

Introductions seemed a good way to break the ice. "Miss Nagato, this is my superior, Colonel Hayate Yagami of the TSAB. I'm Captain Nanoha Takamachi, and my colleague with the big sword is Captain Signum. No surname."

Hayate attempted an awkward smile, whilst Signum simply provided one of her patented grave nods.

"Hayate, this is Yuki Nagato, representative of the Integrated Data... Data Integration... huge alien computer-thingy, and her associates...?"

"Itsuki Koizumi, of the Organisation," said the boy smoothly. They could _hear_ the capital 'O'.

"M-Mikuru Asahina," the other girl stammered. "I'll... umm... just go make the tea, shall I?"

To Nanoha's relief, Hayate's maternal instinct promptly took over.

"A cup of tea would be lovely, thank you." Mikuru gave her a grateful smile and scuttled off. "I'm pleased to meet all of you. I understand you've been having problems with Chaos?"

"It would be more accurate to say that they've taken over," Itsuki replied. "In Hyogo Prefecture and environs, anyway. They have either compromised or fully subverted a significant number of private companies, as well as much of the local government infrastructure. Particular targets are esper factions like my own – we believe that they are attempting to harvest psychic talent."

"Espers?" Nanoha asked. "Are they the local equivalent of mages?"

The smile broadened. "In a manner of speaking, I suppose. Their biggest coup, though, was obtaining the co-operation of the god of this world, Haruhi Suzumiya."

Hayate raised an eyebrow – she'd clearly listened to the recording. "And how did they manage that?"

"Though Miss Suzumiya is undoubtedly powerful, she is also a teenage girl, if an unusually strong-willed one. There are... methods for dealing with those. Deeply unpleasant methods. They replaced someone she cared about with one of their agents. Frankly, she never stood a chance."

Signum was studying him closely. "You sound as if you speak from experience," she stated.

The smile, brittle to begin with, vanished utterly. "I have had... training in such matters. I've never had to use it. I never _want_ to."

A few moments more of that level, searching stare, and the knight lowered her eyes. "Good answer."

There was a pause in the conversation, and Nanoha mulled over the esper's words. '_Someone she cared about'. Was it just me, or was there a bit of hesitation before he used that pronoun?_

The tea arrived – it was anyone's guess where Mikuru had found it – and she sipped it gratefully. It was very good indeed, and certainly a vast improvement on Admiral Lindy Harlaown's infamously sugary green tea. By now things had gotten a lot more relaxed; everyone was sitting down at the table, and the TSAB mages had deactivated their Barrier Jackets – except for Signum, who was currently regarding the desk ornaments as if she expected them to go for her vital organs at any moment. _Professional paranoia, I suppose._

"Has there been any organised resistance to the invaders?" Hayate asked.

Itsuki nodded. "The Organisation has been engaged in a covert war against them ever since we were alerted to the true extent of their influence. Unfortunately, that was only about a week ago, and we've been comprehensively outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and outmatched. Heads rolled over that one, let me tell you – mine was nearly one of them. Anyway, once they figure out how to use Miss Suzumiya against us, it's all over. Miss Asahina's people are even more constrained, for their own reasons."

"And those are?"

"I'm from a separate time-plane," Mikuru explained. "The future, specifically. We can't interfere too much for fear of causing damage to the continuum, and if we ever manage to antagonise them too severely, they can simply alter the course of events so that we are erased from the timeline. We're restricted to the odd nudge here and there, I'm afraid."

"On the plus side, though, it sounds like they haven't managed to irrevocably change anything yet," the colonel surmised. "Otherwise you wouldn't exist, right?"

"I'm sorry, but it's not that simple. We're detecting closed-space activity in our time-plane in a manner consistent with impending destruction. We may be doomed anyway." She blushed. "I really shouldn't be telling you this. It's classified information."

"We understand. What about you, Miss Nagato?"

"The Data Integration Thought Entity is undecided on how to act. The invaders are undoubtedly a disruptive influence, but their actions regarding Miss Suzumiya have provided her with a measure of focus, if not in an optimal direction. Consequently, they have created a form of short-term stability. When coupled with their relatively small area of influence, the wide range of countermeasures prepared to deal with the situation, and the fact that hesitation would have little effect other than resulting in the potential corruption or deletion of a few thousand terrestrial life-forms, the prevalent consensus is that detached observation pending further developments would be the wisest course of action at present."

"And yet you have gone to some effort to arrange a meeting between several enemies of Chaos," Signum noted.

"We interfaces do not possess a single, monolithic consciousness. There are some of us who believe the potential costs of inaction to be too high. Indeed, I would request that when you leave, you take these two with you. As observers of Miss Suzumiya, they are in immediate peril. The individual already replaced was in a similar situation to us, and I am... concerned for his safety."

Her face, as always, was expressionless, but those huge grey eyes told Nanoha everything she needed to know. She suddenly felt a tremendous surge of sympathy for this strange, alien girl.

"Don't worry – we'll look after them," she said reassuringly. "Right, Hayate?"

Her commanding officer nodded. "Agreed. Apart from anything else, they should be a useful source of information if we intend a full-scale intervention against Chaos. What you three have said, coupled with our own experiences, has convinced me – it's time to call in the big guns. Dealing with interdimensional invaders _is_ part of the Bureau's job, after all. Mr. Koizumi, Miss Asahina, do you agree to this?"

"I hate to say it, but Nagato's right," Itsuki said. "This isn't a fight we can win on our own, and this seems the best way to shift the balance back in our favour. I'll need to contact my superiors, though – it wouldn't look too good if I vanish without saying a word."

"M-me too," Mikuru stammered. "Breaching protocol is a very serious offence."

"I shall provide them with the necessary information, plus a recording of this conversation," Yuki stated. "It should not present too great an inconvenience."

"Are we to assume, then, that you will not be accompanying us, Miss Nagato?" Hayate asked.

"That is correct. I shall remain to observe the situation and exert what influence I can on the Data Integration Thought Entity's decision-making processes. My direct superior, Emiri Kimidori, will join you once you return to your vessel. She is a neutral party, willing to provide information but no further direct assistance. My own presence would be seen by others of my number as... dangerously independent, particularly given past events."

"Ah, I see. Good luck, then – we'll try to keep in contact."

The edge of Yuki's mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. "I would appreciate that."

She cocked her head to one side again.

"Your vessel has been detected. If you wish to leave unchallenged, I would recommend that you do so soon."

"Thanks for the tip," Hayate replied. She turned back to Itsuki and Mikuru. "Will you two need to collect any personal belongings before we go?"

"Um, yes, that might be a good idea," the diminutive redhead agreed. "One moment, please."

There was a brief, eye-hurting flicker, and a large black holdall appeared in her hands. She yelped, and almost lost her balance. Itsuki stared at her.

"_How did you do that_?"

She smiled sweetly. "That's classified."

"How about you, Mr. Koizumi?" Nanoha asked.

"Standard Organisation policy is for compromised agents to destroy any effects that might be traced to them. I think this counts. Nagato, can you open a temporary electronic signal link from here to my house?"

The bizarre mechanical chatter started again. "It is done."

"Much obliged." He pulled a squat, cylindrical object out of his pocket, flipped a couple of switches, and pressed the big red button on its top.

"What did that do?" Hayate asked.

"Gutted the place with fire. It should look like an accident with the gas main. Don't worry – shouldn't be any collateral." He looked down at the detonator with a critical eye. "You know, I do sometimes wish our gadgets department had less of an appetite for the dramatic. A big red button? Really?"

The colonel clapped her hands together. "Right, let's go. _Eventide_, pickup for five, please."

_That's an affirmative,_ the technician broadcasted. _Transport on its way._

The last thing Nanoha saw before the light of the transporter rose up around them was the small, fragile-looking figure of Yuki Nagato, standing alone in the abandoned classroom.

* * *

Back on board the frigate, they made an immediate beeline for the bridge. Mikuru didn't have to struggle with the enormous holdall for long – no sooner had they entered one of the more crowded corridors than a small army of male (and some female) crew-members bustled up to help her out with it. Frankly, Nanoha wasn't sure if the girl was pleased or terrified.

She fell in alongside Itsuki, who was regarding the ship with mild interest.

"You seem to be taking this rather well," she commented.

The smile twitched. "In the past week, I've been fighting off _things_ that look like people, had a friend go missing and get replaced with a monster, been dragged through space/time by an inscrutable alien quasideity, got myself pawned off to an extradimensional organisation I've never even heard of, and had to blow up my own base of operations. In the circumstances, looking confident and pretending to know what's going on seems the only reasonable survival strategy."

Nanoha gave a sympathetic wince. "I see. Please try not to worry unnecessarily, though – we don't bite."

"Glad to hear it." He shook his head. "Even Nagato's different. That meeting was the most I've ever heard her speak. Normally she just sits and stares. Kyon's pretty much the only person who can get more than three words out of her. Well, he _was_, anyway."

"Kyon? Is that the one who went missing?"

"That would be him. Honestly, he was the one who really held the group together, even if he'd never admit it. Maybe that's why he got targeted first. Or maybe not. Diplomacy was never his strong point."

The lanky student clenched his fists reflexively, a dim red glow forming around them. "We discovered that several of the enemy's agents were susceptible to our powers. I would give a great deal to be able to employ them against one of their masters."

The rest of the walk passed in silence.

They found the sensors officer waiting for them on the bridge, clearly agitated. Beside him stood an unassuming green-haired girl, presumably the prophesied Kimidori.

"Colonel, this young lady just teleported in. Never even saw her coming. More importantly, we've got enemy vessels closing on us. Still some way away, but they're big. _Really_ big."

"Don't worry, we were warned on both counts," Hayate replied. "Helm, can we outpace them?"

The helm officer chuckled confidently. "They're fast, but we're faster. Give the word, ma'am."

"Good. Prepare to jump to dimensional space, and set a course for the TSAB headquarters on Mid-Childa. Our mission-profile has changed, ladies and gentlemen. It seems that the forces of Chaos have not been very neighbourly in this region of space, and I believe it's the Bureau's duty to do something about it." _And if we can get Vita back in the process, all the better._

The helmsman's grin was echoed across the room as the grizzled officer saluted.

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Now, those of you familiar with _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ may notice that the three members of the SOS Brigade here are not exactly as they are usually depicted - Itsuki showing actual emotion beyond bland cheeriness, for instance, or Yuki being verbose. Rest assured that this is entirely intentional. They've been under a lot of stress lately - especially Itsuki - and the masks they wear in their everyday lives are starting to slip. Except Mikuru, because, seriously, who knows _what's_ up with her?

Trust me, just as in the original 40K, nobody who encounters Chaos comes out entirely unaffected or unscarred. The question is _how_, though, and how well they deal with it.


	10. Networking

**9. Networking**

The Palace of the Gods was a vast structure sprawling both around and downwards from the mostly-rebuilt ruins of the Tokyo-3 Geofront. In fact, it was larger than was physically possible, several parts either partially or fully outside realspace. The Eye of Tzintchi exploited this to its fullest extent.

Despite its name, the room was not Tzintchi's sole domain. It wasn't even eye-shaped... at least, not often, and not deliberately. Instead, it was a bubble of artificially-calm warpspace, operating on a similar principle to the Eldar webway. From it, the gods could see (and interact with) every part of their domain, micromanaging their steadily expanding area of influence as only deific posthumans with limited precognition could.

For a mortal, even a glance at the Eye would be a one-way ticket to gibbering insanity. The room constantly changed its appearance based on the mood of its occupants, the current situation of what it surveyed, and sheer gleeful whimsy, and never more so than when all four gods were in residence.

Tzintchi made an idle whooshing noise through one of his beaks as the _Eventide_ made its escape. "Bloody hell, but that thing's fast in the Warp. Maybe we should bring in a few more of those mages from the Bureau – I'd love to see what makes their technology tick."

Asukhon stroked his hair. "So why not pull the same trick we did on them back at Bloodhaven? Drop 'em back into realspace, let the response squadron bring them in, and spend a relaxing few hours coaxing out those juicy little secrets of theirs? I'll even let you wa-atch..." she added teasingly.

"Much as I hate to turn down an afternoon of happy sadism, I'm afraid we can't do that," Mislaato replied. "Bloodhaven's a nexus of power – we don't have nearly the same amount of control in Haruhi's universe. Not _yet_, anyway."

"Speaking of, what's keeping K.J.?" Asukhon asked. "Thought he'd have the little bitch wrapped around his finger by now."

"He does," her husband replied. "However, he's been getting... distracted of late. Indulging his own appetites. I suspect that some of his brother's weakness may have rubbed off on him."

"Technically speaking, would Kyon not be his father?" Reigle pointed out. "Given that our agent was created from the aforementioned's DNA-approximate, I mean."

Tzintchi waved an airy flipper. "Nah, too confusing. We need to preserve our monopoly on Freudian ambiguities – right, Rei?"

His wife/sister/clone-mother inclined her head. "A fair point."

As a matter of fact, the actions of Kyon's clone were proving themselves to be something of a concern for the gods. Whilst his primary objectives – corrupting Haruhi and anyone else in the vicinity who might prove useful – were continuing at an acceptable rate, he spent far too much time using both her powers and the girl herself in ways that were unpleasant and, more importantly, unprofessional. He was still too useful and too difficult to replace to discard, but their patience was not infinite.

Tzintchi was the first to break their mutual contemplative silence. "Right – next order of business, the Divine Assassin Program. Asuka, you've been keeping tabs on this one. How's it going?"

"Pretty well," she replied. "We've been getting some good recruits in – very motivated. Think I might refer Vita over there once we're done with her – I can see her talents proving very useful."

"Glad to hear it." The leader of the gods stared at the display again. "I've got a feeling that we might be needing them soon."

Though the sudden appearance of the mages in their territory had undoubtedly been useful in the short-term, the information they had gleaned from their captive about how her colleagues had discovered them and their likely intentions now they knew of Chaos's existence made him _very_ uneasy. _We've got a perfectly good scenario going over here – the last thing we need is some self-righteous idealists wandering in and screwing it all up. Besides, daemon-world creation is _not_ supposed to do that._

Perhaps some countermeasures were in order, and the Divine Assassins should do nicely.

***

The USS _Enterprise_ drifted through the outer asteroid belt of the Lakonia system, its sensors probing the space around it with a thousand electronic eyes. There had been reports of pirates in the region, raiding deeper into Federation space from a hidden base. That wasn't what worried the crew most, though. Pirates were simply no match for one of Starfleet's most advanced vessels. What worried them was the system's proximity to the Damocles Nebula, origin point and former base of operations of the extradimensional invaders that had ravaged the Alpha Quadrant.

The so-called 'Year of Chaos' had crippled the Federation, and things had only gotten worse after the invaders' mysterious departure. The proposal to scrap or modify the Prime Directive as a form of appeasement had been predictably controversial; some still believed that Chaos could be repelled through military might, some doubted they would return at all, and a significant number were simply reluctant to abandon their longest-held tradition at gunpoint.

In the end, the conservatives had won, but at a cost. Several worlds had seceded after the vote was cast, particularly those which had had actual contact with the enemy during the war. In an official statement, they called the Prime Directive 'the biggest suicide pact in history', and set about uplifting pre-warp civilisations with a gusto born of desperation.

The remainder of the Federation Council's collective reaction came as no surprise to anyone. Amidst strident accusations of treason and cowardice, they motioned to reclaim the lost planets and defend the Directive – by force, if necessary. It was a matter of days after that declaration that the first shots were fired, and soon the mightiest interstellar nation in the Quadrant was embroiled in bloody civil war. When combined with the destruction of the Borg in that part of the galaxy, a power vacuum was created that others were quick to exploit – especially the Romulans, who had escaped the Year of Chaos largely intact.

As the (very) reluctant instigator of the motion against the Prime Directive, Captain Jean-Luc Picard had gone from being one of Starfleet's most respected officers to an abject disgrace almost overnight, reviled by both sides. Now, he and the still-loyal crew aboard the _Enterprise_ were in a form of self-imposed exile, patrolling the borders of their beloved Federation (or whatever it called itself now) against the myriad enemies who now circled it as hyenas would a dying lion.

"Captain, scanners are picking up a subspace anomaly near our position," Lieutenant Commander Data reported. "Another ship has just arrived, but it doesn't seem to be using a warp drive. It's almost as if it... jumped straight out of subspace."

"Like the _Stiletto_?" Commander Riker asked, his face pale.

"The precise execution is different, but the underlying principles are indeed analogous to those employed by that ship's FTL drive," the android agreed. "Some relation between the two vessels is not outside the limitations of probability."

"All hands, red alert," Picard ordered. "If the forces of Chaos have returned, we can't afford to take any risks. Mr. Data, put that ship on screen."

"Of course, captain," Data replied.

The mysterious vessel was... not the _Stiletto_; that much was immediately obvious. Unlike the vast, cathedral-like affair that the Chaos vessel had been, it was a small, streamlined ship, less than half the size of the _Enterprise_, though it did retain the sleekly murderous lines that could only designate a dedicated warship. Its prow was split into four huge fins that by their arrangement appeared to form some sort of focusing array, and its silver-and-black bodywork gleamed against the darkness of space.

"They're hailing us sir," Lieutenant Daniels said. "Their equipment's a... bit strange, but broadly compatible with our own comms systems."

"Very well – patch them through."

The face that appeared on the main screen was reassuringly human, belonging to a serious-looking young man in a severe black uniform. If he had horns, tentacles, or ominously-glowing eyes, they were not immediately obvious.

"Greetings, Captain Picard of the Federation," he said formally. "I am Admiral Chrono Harlaown, commander of the Time-Space Administration Bureau heavy cruiser _Claudia_. We're currently engaged in an investigative mission, and were wondering if we could borrow a moment of your time."

"How do you know who I am?" Picard asked.

An apologetic smile. "I'm afraid we took the liberty of listening in on your internal communications for a while before we elected to make contact. I'm very sorry for the intrusion, but when exploring an unknown and potentially hostile universe, a certain measure of paranoia is only sensible."

"Apology accepted – I'd prefer if you didn't make a habit of it, though. So what did you wish to talk to us about, admiral?" _Admiral? Really? He's half my age at the very most. For the love of all that's holy, please don't tell me that Doctor Crusher's boy had cousins..._

"We have recently been alerted to the existence of a group of entities called the 'Chaos Gods' who are believed to represent a threat on a pan-dimensional scale. According to our sources, their agents recently carried out an extended military action against this universe, and we're looking for first-hand information on that."

Picard leaned back in his chair. "Then we have much to discuss."

***

For Master Luke Skywalker, head of the new Jedi Order, life was good. The war with the Empire had finally ended, he'd managed to prevent yet _another_ galactic invasion and, to top it all, he was married to the sort of wife who he had once thought existed only in fantasies. It was thus both annoying and worrying that something still niggled away at the back of his mind, preventing him from providing his spectacular good fortune with the enjoyment that it deserved.

Something dark intruded upon his meditations, a vast, malign presence that was still distant and yet growing stronger every day. When he cast his sight across the galaxy, he very occasionally saw hard, black dots appearing and disappearing within it, never long enough or often enough for him to be sure they were more than illusion, but filled with an ineffable _wrongness_ that he could not ignore.

It hadn't done his honeymoon any favours, either.

At present, he was sat cross-legged in his spartan quarters in the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin, contemplating life, the universe and everything as only he could. A glittering canvas of stars and nebulae was spread out before his mind's eye, dancing with slow, ponderous grace. Nothing seemed wrong, and yet... _there!_

It was another of the intruders, coursing with alien energies that simply did not _belong_ in this galaxy or even this universe, but it was... different, somehow. He sensed none of the malign, predatory intent that the others of its kind had exuded – the dark side didn't flow nearly as freely around it. Or at all, for that matter.

_Curious._

He sent out a subtle nudge, redirecting the alien ship's course towards Yavin IV. Meeting these... beings (people? Creatures?) might prove very interesting indeed.

***

The psychic signal washed across the light cruiser _Charak's Gift_, tugging gently at the minds of the crew. Arf's tail twitched, and she glanced at Zafira.

"Did you catch that?"

The towering Wolkenritter nodded. "It appears we have been given an invitation."

***

Hayate walked at the head of the Bureau delegation, flanked on either side by heavily-armed guards. Who they were guarding from whom had yet to be decided – it was just that guards gave a first-contact situation a pleasingly official air. They were on an elevated walkway above a bustling city, golden-walled towers stretching up on either side them and gleaming transit tubes criss-crossing the air above.

After they had arrived back on Mid-Childa, the vast bureaucracy of the planet-sized capital had swung into action. The first stage had been verifying their story – 'look, they're evil, all right?' was not valid grounds for dropping the full might of the Bureau on some unsuspecting civilisation from a very great height, after all, much to the benefit of the surrounding multiverse. Their combat logs had been pored over by the Intelligence department (especially Nanoha's conversation with Precia), and their three passengers from Haruhi's universe had been personally interrogated by the amiably sinister Inspector Verossa Acous – an experience that they had borne with surprising fortitude.

With the threat confirmed and acknowledged, the next step was determining its magnitude. Emiri Kimidori had helpfully provided them with a list of the universes the gods had accessed via their territory, and an expedition led by Hayate's old friend Chrono had been sent to investigate.

The information they had returned with was less than encouraging. A single prototype frigate had engaged a quarter of a galaxy (apparently, 'look, they're evil, all right?' was not just an acceptable _casus belli_ for Chaos, but an all-time favourite) and effectively won. After hours of debate, High Command reached a decision – the Bureau could not deal with this situation on its own. Allies were required. The campaign against the invaders was designated 'Operation Guardian', a pleasingly ambiguous title that covered a multitude of sins.

Two universes were immediately obvious as candidates, being both easily-accessible from Bureau-administered territory, and relatively high on the energy gradient, indicating advanced sentient civilisations within (or that several stars had simultaneously gone supernova, which the more cynical technicians noted likely amounted to the same thing anyway). One was on the list of places affected by Chaos, which likely gave them some sort of motive assuming that the gods were using their standard methods of diplomacy. The other had no supposable motive, but such a ridiculously high energy reading that overtures were probably worth a shot anyway.

Personnel from the _Eventide_ were assigned to both missions, those headed for the former led by Nanoha, and those headed for the latter commanded by Hayate herself. At present, though, said 'command' merely consisted of the omnipresent Signum, who had no doubt come up with several dozen ways to incapacitate or kill their escort by now (should the situation demand it, of course), and Corporals Nakajima and Lanster, who were busily gawping at their surroundings... especially Corporal Nakajima.

Hayate, on the other hand, was rather bemused. The city _was _impressive, yes, but not that much more so than the most expensive bits of, say, Clanagan City on Mid-Childa. She'd seen the readings, and these people were practically living in caves and picking the lice off each others' backs compared to their full potential.

_Ignorance or deliberate limitation, I wonder? If the latter, why?_

They approached the entrance to an official-looking building that appeared to be built on a slight rise, letting it overlook the rest of the city. One of the guards peeled off from the group and inputted a code into a panel discreetly hidden in one of the columns flanking the doorway. The doors slid open smoothly, revealing a grandiose, red-carpeted hall beyond. At one end was another set of doors built into a thick vertical cylinder that was presumably some sort of lift. The shining gold of the city extended inside as well, set off nicely by rows of white marble statues depicting heroic-looking figures that lined the walls, many of them wearing frankly improbable sunglasses.

By now, Corporal Nakajima had produced a camera from somewhere within her uniform and started taking pictures, earning a sour look and sharp reprimand from Corporal Lanster.

"Behave, children," Signum muttered.

The two young NCOs hastily saluted and attempted to display the lethally alert intelligence befitting Bureau combat mages, almost tripping over each other in the process. It took quite a bit of effort for Hayate to keep a straight face.

_Remember, ladies, we're here as ambassadors of the TSAB. Do try to make a good impression, won't you?_

_Aye, ma'am._

_A-aye, ma'am._

The lift turned out to be a clear-walled affair, offering spectacular views of both the interior of the building and the city beyond. It rose at a faintly terrifying rate – even the guards looked slightly disconcerted. Eventually, it levelled out at around the fiftieth floor, opening into a spacious office which most likely managed to achieve its combination of open-roofed vista and pleasantly warm climate through the judicious use of force-fields.

Two men stood in the office, both in the rather garish neon-trimmed clothing that appeared to be standard-issue on this world. One was the sort of unobtrusive clerkish type who was seemingly cloned in vats across the multiverse, and the other was a tall, craggy-featured individual dressed in a predominantly white outfit that looked very much like some sort of military uniform.

"Ah, hello," the latter said in a deep, smooth voice. "You are Colonel Yagami, yes? A pleasure to meet you."

"Likewise," Hayate replied. "Sir, we approached you because-"

He cut her off with a gesture and an amused smile. "Don't tell me. You're having problems with a bunch of well-intentioned extremists who are apparently trying to prevent some vast cosmic catastrophe and inflicting far more harm than good in the process. That about cover it?"

She stared at him. "_How did you know_?"

"We get a lot of those around here. I used to be one myself, in fact." He turned to the clerk. "Hoshino, get our guests something to drink, would you?"

"Of course, President Rossiu."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yeah, I don't intend to shy away from the... implications of Mr. Ikari's relationship with his fellow-gods. That boy be officially messed-up, and not just because he's been dipping his brain in Warp-energy for decades by now. Seriously, Hideaki Anno read _way_ too much Freud before he started that series.

The events in Federation-space seemed the most likely outcome of Chaos's intervention there. That's not a nation that takes kindly to being bullied, and blasting apart a not-insignificant portion of the galaxy is generally not a good way to create a nice, clean political solution anyway. This is going to end up as a recurring theme of the fic, I think - consequences and fallout. Oh, and the dig at Chrono and, by proxy, the other suspiciously young TSAB officers was something I just couldn't resist.

Regarding Gurren-Lagann, the author of the original piece said that that was a universe his protagonists were going to stay the hell away from, and with good reason. Given that this fic centres on their plans spiralling rapidly out of control (pun not intended), it was only logical that everybody's favourite thick-skulled drill-obsessives should get involved. I also disagree with him that their inclusion would result in the gods getting stomped down in three seconds flat - the Spiral Nation, for all its size and power, has several very big, very obvious weaknesses that something like newChaos could easily exploit. I'll let you guess what they are...

Again, thanks for reading, and see you next week!


	11. Hospital Visit

**10. Hospital Visit**

It was in fact almost a week after Asukhon's visit and the events that had followed that Kyon and Maria's breakout attempt began. The student's nightmares had been getting worse and more vivid, not only including what had happened to him so far (which was bad enough), but other things as well. He saw palaces of bones stretching from the ruins of North High School, lines of captured espers being herded into hatchways like yawning mouths, and at the centre of it all, Haruhi screaming into the darkness as a grinning, shadowy figure slowly stripped away everything that made her human. At times, things got so bad and so vivid that he suspected some form of outside influence at work.

They had taken the bandages off halfway through the week, leaving a throbbing, purplish bruise that he dimly recognised as having been received when the Koizumi-thing slammed his head into the coffee table before – _no, best not to think about that._ It repeated itself often enough in his sleep as it was.

There was a rapping at the door, and Maria's voice called out softly.

"It's time, Kyon."

_Finally..._ "All right – I'll just get ready, shall I?"

He went to get dressed, pausing at the wardrobe for a moment to decide precisely what one should wear when engaged in a suicidal attack against sadistic gods. In the end, he picked the dinner jacket he had received at his first meeting with them, deciding that the unasked-for gift would provide just the right 'screw you' message. The bow tie was fiddly as ever, though.

He retrieved the Noisy Cricket from beneath his pillow and tucked it into his trouser pocket, marvelling yet again at its diminutive size. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was being deliberately set up for failure, but decided it didn't matter. Whatever the case, he was determined to give a good account of himself before he went, if only to see the expressions on the gods' faces.

Walking back into the lounge, he checked himself out in the mirror. Pale, nervous, and sweating profusely, but his hands were steady and his eyes calm. _Best I can hope for, I suppose._ He turned to the door, ignoring the drone as it flashed a few interrogative symbols at him.

"Right then," he said. "Let's do this."

Maria opened said door with one hand. The other held an enormous black rifle. Following Kyon's gaze, she grinned.

"Hellgun. Basically, a very powerful rapid-firing laser. Borrowed it from a friend in the armoury – he owes me a few favours."

"How come I don't get one?"

"Well, I could offer several reasons – training requirements, for a start – but mostly because I couldn't get the damned thing through the flap, and carrying two at once is a _really_ good way to attract suspicion." She glanced up and down the corridor. "All clear – let's go."

The drone chirped a warning, and buzzed in threateningly. She levelled the hellgun at it, there was a sharp _crack_, and the little machine fell to the floor in pieces.

"Did I ever mention how much I hate those things?" she asked nobody in particular.

Kyon set off after her. "So, where are we headed?"

"The gods' private quarters – they're a little way south of here. They're changing the guard at the moment, which means lots of coverage of the outside of the Palace, but not much inside. We should be able to get there relatively unopposed, and once we've done so, I've got a few little surprises prepared for them." She patted the webbing slung over her armour.

It was at that point, of course, that they rounded a corner and met an entire squad of palace guards going the other way.

Maria didn't bother trying to talk her way out of the situation. Instead, she simply unslung her rifle and sent a barrage of invisible shots into her erstwhile colleagues. They tried to respond, but she was moving too fast to target, hammering into them in the confined quarters with the force of a freight train. Kyon, meanwhile, could only hide and stare.

She grabbed a guard by the arm and _pulled_. Kyon had seen this manoeuvre in playground brawls – normally, it either overbalanced your opponent or earned you a punch to the face. He'd never seen it rip a limb off before. He turned around, tried very hard not to get reacquainted with the morning meal, and _almost_ succeeded.

Sometime later, he straightened up, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and looked back at the corridor. There wasn't much left of the patrol – just organic debris scattered across the floor. And the walls. And the ceiling. His stomach heaved again.

Maria looked up, idly scraping something sticky and reddish-brown off her gloves. "They know we're here now. We should get moving."

Kyon remembered the drone. "I think they already knew. Look, how did you _do_ that?"

She grinned, and broke into a loping run. "Didn't think the gods would want ordinary humans as guards, did you?"

He struggled after her, trying to ignore the unpleasant squelching sensation under his shoes. "No, I suppose not, but _they_ didn't seem very-"

"Less talking, more fleeing," the renegade guard growled. "Do you _want_ to get caught?"

"R-right..." _Sense of impending doom... rising._

They actually managed to get quite some distance before they ran into another of the palace's inhabitants. This one was a solitary guard, who appeared from one of the passageways behind them as they exited a Y-shaped junction. He stared at them for a moment, before taking aim at Maria's back.

Kyon acted on pure instinct, tugging the Noisy Cricket out of his pocket, pointing it in the general direction of the soldier, and pulling the trigger. The tiny gun let out a deafening roar and he was hurled backwards by the recoil, missing the wall by scant inches. Once he had regained his senses, he got back to his feet and assessed the damage.

It had been intended as a warning shot, more to throw the man's aim off than anything else. Instead, the roof had collapsed around the area of impact, and everything of the guard above the waist was simply... gone. If he hadn't already lost his breakfast, he would have done so then.

As he stared blankly at the dainty wisp of smoke coming from the Cricket's barrel, Maria gave him a thumbs-up. "Nice save, Kyon."

"Don't... umm... don't mention it. Maria, you mentioned fleeing earlier. Fleeing would be a very good idea right now, I think."

Another grin. "Looks like you're starting to catch on."

Kyon said nothing in response – he was too busy remembering the brief spray of red he had seen as the Cricket fired. _Something _else_ to haunt my dreams. Lovely._

They continued onwards, more slowly this time, with Maria checking the angles whenever they came to another intersection. Though they all started to look the same after a while, Kyon was pretty sure he recognised this one.

"Maria, would I be right in thinking we're near the hospital?"

"Yep. Why'd you ask?"

He remembered a child's face, staring at him with terrified blue eyes. _Vita._

"We... need to stop by there. I've got a friend-"

"Look, if this is about that kid you met when they were patching you back together, Kyon, it sounded like the gods got their claws pretty deep into her. I'm sorry to say it, I really am, but they've probably turned her already. Even if they haven't she's too far gone for you to save. Trust me – I've seen this a dozen times by now. The toughest of them lasted a couple of weeks. A child? She doesn't stand a chance. Just think of it as another thing we need to pay those twisted freaks back for, that's my advice."

Kyon shook his head. "No. I need to find out for myself. If there's even a chance-"

"There isn't! That's what I've been trying to _tell_ you! Besides, what would you do even if she is recoverable? We're in the heart of the gods' domain – there isn't any way out. Were you intending to hide her in a closet or something?" She was simmering with barely-controlled anger, the scars on her face turning white.

"Look, if you don't want to-" _Why is she getting so agitated about this?_

"I _don't want to_ see some white-knight teenage idiot dying pointlessly. _Is that so hard to understand_?"

"We're going to die anyway, Maria," he replied with a calm he hadn't known he possessed. "I thought that was rather the point of this, in fact. Now I've been given the option, I'd prefer to go doing something constructive than facing down an eldritch abomination with a high-explosive pea-shooter."

"You talked to her for five minutes and you're prepared to throw your life away on some kind of quixotic rescue attempt? Kyon, there's chivalry, and then there's flat-out _idiocy_."

"They had her strapped to a hospital bed for weeks. Everything they did to me, she got three times over. _Nobody_ deserves that – creepy not-quite-children included."

Maria's eyes flared, and it wasn't just a figure of speech. Her skin reddened, and flickers of motion appeared on her face like worms under her flesh.

"You _idiot_," she snarled through rapidly-growing fangs. "You spineless, pathetic _moron_."

Kyon backed away, fumbling for his gun. "Maria-"

"Don't 'Maria' me, brat!" Her voice had an animalistic snarl to it. "I spend day after day trying to be your friend, soaking in your pointless, juvenile bullshit, and offering you sweet revenge on a silver platter, and what do you do? Try to crawl out of it at the earliest opportunity just because you can't _bear_ the thought of getting blood on those lily-white hands of yours, am I right?"

A pair of horns had emerged from her forehead, and there was a deafening crack as two vast, leathery wings smashed their way through her body armour. Kyon could only stare, paralysed.

The thing that had been Maria grinned horribly. "Come on, Kyon – I'll show you what you've been missing out on. You're far too weak to admit it, I'm sure, but there was a bit of you that enjoyed watching that mortal die, wasn't there? That sweet, addictive rush of power... me and my sisters _feed_ on it, you know? I felt it bleeding off you. I know what you're capable of. Let me show you how the _experts_ do things..."

She raised the hellgun... but it wasn't a gun, not any more. In its place was an enormous, spike-hafted axe, its blades engraved with unholy runes. She took a few experimental swings, the weapon softly moaning as it cleaved the air, and advanced towards him.

Kyon had been in this situation before, when the insane Humanoid Interface Ryoko Asakura had cornered him in a classroom with some precision reality-warping and a very large knife. Maria, though, didn't need any special powers to immobilise him – those burning yellow eyes did the job quite nicely. She left charred hoof-prints on the carpet as she walked forward, the axe tracing ever-more-complex patterns in front of her.

_Yuki, if you're planning on staging a dramatic rescue, now would be the time..._

His fingers brushed against the warm metal grip of the Cricket, jolting him out of his mesmeric trance. He leapt backwards, eliciting an outraged howl from the daemon, and drew the miniature pistol. He fired and turned as he did so, letting the momentum propel him into a running start. Not looking back, he sprinted down the corridor, trying to remember the route to the hospital.

_I have to get her out of here. I have to._

***

Tzintchi whistled in appreciation as the daemon who had employed the cover identity of 'Maria Vargas' was explosively atomised.

"And that, my dear," he said smugly to Asukhon, "is why you don't use daemons with self-control issues for a job like this. You know, I would have happily provided one of my own Black Pharaohs if you'd only asked."

She snorted. "And have you steal the thunder? Not bloody likely. I wanted a shot at turning the runt myself – would have worked, too, if that digitised whore hadn't squirreled away sweet little Mikuru before we could get our hands on her. Besides, I figured that you'd have a backup plan anyway – you always do. So what is it?"

Tzintchi leaned back, all four of his current mouths stretched into broad smiles. "Simple. We do nothing."

The other gods stared at him – except for Reigle, who was busy doing something unpleasant and probably unsanitary in the corner.

"I... don't follow," Mislaato said eventually.

"We let him carry on his merry way, think he's foiled our plot. No need to pull back the guards, either – we need a bit of verisimilitude, after all, and what he did to poor old Maria raises some interesting possibilities; it might be that placing him in mortal peril could trigger an ascension. Asuka, dear, I want you on station in case that happens."

"On it," she acknowledged. "You're not expecting it to, though. Happen, that is."

"Nope – it's a possibility, but not a real likelihood. There aren't that many patrols between buddy Kyon and his objective – he might even get through unopposed. Once that happens, well... how's Vita doing?"

"Ready to be moved out, last I checked," Mislaato replied. "We were thinking of having her stationed to the Divine Assassin training camp in Greece. She's become a lot more tractable of late – think Asuka's intervention really helped."

"Glad to hear it. Ladies, grab the popcorn – either we're about to get a new god on our side, or an entity capable of _killing_ a god. That, I believe, is what's technically known as a 'win-win situation'."

***

Kyon scuttled through the corridors, clutching the Cricket tightly. He'd encountered a few guards since Maria's attack, but a few shots in their direction had proven an adequate deterrent. He'd mostly tried to aim for walls and ceilings, attempting to block their pursuit, but the little weapon was horribly inaccurate, and it didn't help that he'd never fired a gun before that day. He hoped he hadn't hurt too many of them.

Eventually, he turned a corner and saw the sterile whiteness of the hospital ward ahead. He charged in, setting off about a dozen alarms as he did so. _Wonderful._

Medical staff closed in from both directions, brandishing either nasty-looking surgical implements or their own natural weaponry, which was generally even _worse_. He pointed the Cricket at them, fervently wishing that he had been given a more intimidating-looking weapon. Given the way they recoiled from it, though, they had presumably seen one in action before.

"Vita! VITA!"

"Kyon?" The voice was faint and slightly muffled, coming from some way down the left-hand side of the ward.

Kyon rushed towards it, waving the gun at the advancing staff in what he hoped was a threatening manner. He tugged aside the curtain... and saw a girl apparently in her mid-teens, sitting up in bed. She was wearing a standard-issue hospital gown, and her head was shaved. About the only thing he recognised was those strange, elongated eyes.

"... Vita?"

She smiled. "Hello, Kyon. The gods told me you were coming. They've done so much for me, you know – let me see the world in a whole new light. I can't wait to help my friends learn about it, especially Hayate. She won't like it at first – I certainly didn't – and I might have to hurt her a little to get the message across, but she'll come around in the end. Then we'll be together forever."

The smile vanished, and her eyes narrowed. "But you don't want that, do, you, Kyon? You want to take me away, try to 'save' me, ruin everything the gods have done. It's because you're scared. Scared of what they can do for you. You aren't worthy of their love. That's why you have to die – they told me that, too."

She extended her arm outwards, and a long-handled hammer appeared from it. It seemed to be a product of the same design school as Maria's axe – lots of dark iron, jagged spikes, and glowing runes.

Kyon backed away. "Vita, seriously, snap out of it. This isn't funny. Didn't you say you didn't want Hayate to see you as a pet?" _Christ on a bike, am I some sort of magnet for girls with psycho weapons or something?_

She stood up, holding the hammer nonchalantly in one hand. "That's the thing, though – I'm not a pet. I'm a follower, a worshipper. I was wrong, and I'm going to teach Hayate that as well, even if I have to engrave the truth on her body."

"You say it like there's a difference," Kyon replied, trying to play for time. _Last time, she mentioned a reset code or something. Come on, what was it again? Think, Kyon!_

Vita didn't take the bait, though, instead simply swinging the hammer at him and forcing him to take a few more steps back. By now, the hospital staff had formed a ring around them, their faces alight with savage anticipation.

He ducked under a second swing, and felt his shoes slip against the vinyl flooring. He fell, and felt hands grab his left arm while a claw closed around his right, causing the Cricket to fall to the ground. Thus immobilised, he could only watch as Vita raised the hammer for the killing blow.

"_Stahlwind B-2_!" he screamed. "_STAHLWIND B-2_!"

The effect was instantaneous. Red light poured from the transformed girl's body, and she let loose an ear-piercing shriek. When it had faded, the red-headed child he had seen on his first trip to the hospital stood in her place, wearing a simple black dress. Even the hammer was different, a gleaming steel affair devoid of its former unsightly decoration.

She looked around, her gaze lashing into the assembled medics like a whip. "_What did you do to me_?"

They shuffled backwards, gradually picking up speed, until the shuffling developed into a full-scale rout. Kyon, meanwhile, was unceremoniously dumped to the floor. Vita glanced down at him, and the edge of her mouth lifted in a typically un-childlike expression.

"Kyon, right? I owe you one, kid."

He got up awkwardly, stuffing the Cricket back into his pocket as he did so. "No problem. Umm... are you all right?"

"Been better," she replied absently, looking around. "That's the thing I hate about resets – well apart from the potential data corruption, anyway. Hayate spent _ages_ making my clothes, and now they're likely gone for good. Hospital freaks probably burned the physical copies too, knowing them."

She tugged the hem of her skirt. "I hate this default design – the shoulder-straps really chafe after a while. S'why it became tradition for our masters to provide their own. Hayate always did the best ones, though."

Kyon cleared his throat as she continued into a reminiscent grumble, and she gave a guilty start.

"Crap – getting distracted in the middle of enemy territory? Those deific bastards are going to _pay_ for what they did to my head. Come on, kid – let's go. I don't want to spend a minute longer in this shithole."

She stumped off, hammer at the ready. Kyon followed, smiling in relief. He might have still been in the middle of a gigantic, monster-filled stronghold that didn't obey the laws of reality, but he suddenly felt a whole lot safer.

***

Meanwhile, in the Eye, Tzintchi stared blankly at the display.

"Didn't see that coming," he said. "Really should have, but I didn't."

"So what do we do now?" Asukhon asked.

"Reinforce the top floors of the Palace, and deploy three air legions into the Geofront. Orders should be to redirect the fugitives downwards if possible, and employ lethal force if not."

All three of them looked at Reigle. Eventually, Tzintchi shrugged.

"What she said."

The goddess of despair smiled, revealing row after row of decayed teeth.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, I'm back. Thanks for the reviews, those who have posted them - always happy to receive more if you are so inclined. Hope I'm successfully managing to bring the creepy - believe me, there's a lot more of it to come in later chapters. A _whole_ lot more. For now, though, let's see whether poor old Kyon can actually catch a break for once.

For the record, I don't see Chaos (in its specific 40K definition) as being an explicit incarnation of anarchy, illogic, and disorder. Otherwise, its servants would simply not be capable of the complex, intricate plans they are so known for. Instead, just as the Warp is a manifestation of sentient thought processes, so is Chaos a manifestation of instinct and emotion... which just happen to quite often be anarchic, illogical and disorderly. Its name is a label, not a definition.


	12. Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

**11. Relocation, Relocation, Relocation**

Kyon and Vita ran – not in any particular direction, but simply _away_. The corridors had changed from five-star-hotel luxury to stark, metallic functionality, like what he imagined the inside of a high-tech military base looked like. There were signs at the junctions, but none of them seemed to point anywhere useful. Maybe some people could have constructed an elaborate escape mechanism out of Store Closet X-76's medical supplies and cleaning equipment, but Kyon wasn't one of them.

"At least they don't seem to be chasing us anymore," Vita commented.

A series of harsh, metallic clangs sounded from an interconnecting side-passage, growing steadily louder until an armoured behemoth hove into view. It was easily eight feet tall and inhumanly broad, holding an enormous, boxy cannon in its gauntleted hands. Its head was obscured by a stylised helmet that vaguely resembled a howling face.

"You... just had... to say... it, didn't... you?" Kyon wheezed.

The apparition snarled something unintelligible, and levelled its gun at them. To the student's terrified eyes, the barrel seemed to _stare_, becoming large enough to fit his head inside.

Vita brought her hammer into the guard position, and a grating, robotic voice came from the weapon's stubby head.

"Panzer Hindernis."

A geometric shell of red light appeared before her, just as the monster opened fire. The corridor was lit by a barrage of detonations that seemed to go on forever... but when the smoke cleared, Vita was still standing, the barrier cracked but unbroken. She held out her hand, and a row of iron spheres appeared from nowhere, suspended above the ground. Kyon, standing behind her, couldn't see her face, but knew that it was wearing a diabolical grin.

"My turn."

"Schwalbe Fliegen," the hammer announced, and she swung it into the waiting balls, encasing them in ominous red energy and propelling them forwards.

The monster stopped trying to reload and attempted to dive out of the way, but the corridor was simply too narrow. The projectiles turned in midair and slammed into it with the force of cannon-shot, knocking it backwards and cracking its armour.

Vita didn't give it a moment to recover, charging forwards with her hammer raised.

"Tödliche Strafe!"

The blow landed with an enormous explosion, sending the monster skidding away on its back, trailing bits of armour. It came to rest against the far wall, still smoking slightly.

Kyon peered over her shoulder. "Is it-?"

"Unconscious. Should be out for a few hours, though. Space Marines are _tough_ sons-of-bitches."

"Ah... your surname. Is it Rassendyll, by any chance?"

"No. Why the hell would it be?"

"Never mind, just checking." _Suppose you're more of a Sapt anyway. Good grief, now I'm getting the narrative all muddled up... is this what shellshock feels like? Fascinating._

She looked at him oddly for a moment, and then glanced at the signs on the intersection. "Good news, kid. Observation deck this way. Observation deck means windows. Windows mean a way out."

"Eh? How? Don't tell me you're planning on us jumping out of-"

She indicated downwards, and he saw that she was hovering several inches above the ground. "Next question?"

"Retracted."

"Good. Let's get going, shall we? Oh, and if you look up my skirt, I'll stick Graf Eisen where the sun does not shine."

"What? Why would I _want_ to?"

"Crap – that reset de-aged me again, didn't it? I swear, kid, you do not know what frustration truly is until you've gone seven hundred years without hitting puberty."

Kyon had to smile at that. "Trust me – it's overrated."

"Given that this one involved me getting turned into a brainwashed, homicidal slave, you might have a point. Like I said, let's go."

She floated off in a manner that made Kyon acutely conscious of his aching legs. He staggered after her, wishing for one insane moment that the SOS Brigade's cross-country session had contained less Mikuru-retrieval and more actual _running_.

As they approached the observation deck, they heard more heavy footsteps similar to those of the Marine Vita had defeated. She held up a hand.

"Hold it, kid."

They stood there for a few moments, before she spoke again in a low voice.

"Shit – it's a full combat squad. No helping it, this is going to get messy. Close your eyes, kid. I don't want you to see this."

Kyon did as he was told, and heard the voice of her hammer, Graf Eisen, again.

"Raketenform."

For good measure, he put his fingers in his ears. That didn't block out everything, though.

After the commotion had died down, he removed the fingers, opened the eyes, and walked into the room. It was huge, several stories high, with balconies and walkways obscuring much of the ceiling. One wall was entirely comprised of a glass window overlooking n enormous, cavernous space in which distant, winged figures soared with liquid grace. In the middle of the deck Vita was leaning on her hammer, panting. Leaned against the walls were the bodies of five Marines. Two were in good enough repair to presumably be unconscious. The others... weren't.

"Wh-what did you _do_ to them?" he asked.

Vita looked up, her face grim. "I'm a killer, kid. It's what I was designed for. Hayate helped me a lot, and I try to avoid it when possible these days, but sometimes... sometimes, you have to go back to your roots."

She pointed up at the walkways. "Clear a few of those away, would you? I need some elbow room if I'm going to get through that window."

_Oh, right, the Cricket._ He opened fire, taking chunks out of the masonry and getting driven to his knees by the recoil in the process. Vita rolled out of the way as a particularly large piece of debris fell dangerously close.

"Not_ now_, you idiot! Wait until I'm clear!"

He winced. "Oh, damn, sorry, I wasn't thinking..."

"That much is evident," she grumbled, brushing lint off her shoulder. "Can you try it again, please? _Without_ almost crushing me this time."

"Got it."

A few dozen blasts later, and the obstructions were cleared, creating an impressive pile of rubble on the floor. By now, Kyon had seriously started to wonder about the Noisy Cricket. _Where does such a tiny gun keep all that ammunition? Does it ever run out?_

Beside him, Vita gave a satisfied smile. "That's better. Stand back, kid – I'm going to make us an exit."

She climbed to the top of the rubble, absently kicking one of the unconscious Space Marines in the head as she went by. Once she reached the summit, she regarded the window for a few seconds, before swinging Graf Eisen in a wide arc that looped all the way around her body.

"Zerstörungform!" it announced with metallic satisfaction, and its head reshaped itself in a flash of red light.

The new form resembled an enormous, blocky, drill-tipped missile, bigger than Vita herself. Not that that stopped her from carrying it with almost the same ease as when it had been about the size of a croquet mallet, though. She leapt into the air and raised the monstrous hammer above her head, its handle stretching and head expanding to an impossible size. Suddenly, Kyon understood very well why she had wanted some space cleared before she tried this.

"_Destruction Hammer_!" she screamed, and brought the weapon crashing downwards.

The window was clearly made out of something tougher than glass – diamond, perhaps, which would certainly be in-keeping with the gods' fondness for ostentation. That didn't save it, though. Engine flaring and drill spinning, the missile-hammer smashed into it, and after a moment's resistance, it gave way in a rain of broken panes and glittering shards.

Happily for Kyon, he had managed to retrieve his jaw from the floor before she turned around.

"Impressive," he said with forced nonchalance.

Vita managed a dainty midair bow as Graf Eisen returned to its usual form. "Why, thank you, kind sir."

She drifted down, turned her back to him, and indicated her waist. "Hold on tight, kid – things are going to get a little bit bumpy."

Kyon knelt down and put his arms around her, feeling intensely awkward. "Are you sure you'll be able to lift both of us?"

"Unless you were downing lead weights for breakfast, shouldn't be a problem," she replied. "Then again, given the hospital food..."

They lifted off, and the student learned another important lesson – namely, that eight-year-olds, no matter how inhumanly strong they happen to be, are not naturally-suited for having your entire body-weight hanging off them. _An intelligent designer_, he thought, _would have given them handles somewhere around the kidneys._ He held on as tight as he could, ignoring the dull pain in his arms, and hoped fervently that he wasn't doing something ghastly to her internal organs in the process.

As they flew into the cavern, Kyon took the opportunity to look around. There was something weirdly organic about the place, as if they were in the stomach of some leviathan. Structures hung from the ceiling like stalactites, and the walls had an odd, shifting appearance to them, as if they were home to uncounted millions of tiny (or not-so-tiny) creatures. There was a strange, clammy yellow mist in the air that obscured the most distant reaches of the cavern, and he couldn't help but wonder just how big it was.

_You could fit an entire city in here._ Another glance at the buildings both above and below. _Maybe they did._

"What's the plan?" he asked.

"The gods told me about this place," Vita replied. "They called it the Geofront, an enormous artificial cavern under Tokyo-3 that got turned into a military base by the old regime."

"Tokyo-3?"

"Think they got a bit careless with the first two. Point is, it's supposedly not that far underground. If we get to the roof, we might be able to either find an exit or make another one of our own."

"Sounds good to me. Hey, what are those big black clouds up there?"

"They're... not clouds," Vita replied slowly. "Holy shit, _incoming_!"

The nearest 'cloud' approached with unnatural speed, resolving itself into a mass of the airborne figures he had seen through the window. Kilted, shadow-faced male figures sent bolts of energy from crackling staves in their direction, whilst red-skinned, leather-winged she-daemons (presumably Maria's 'sisters') and skeletal, mangy crows the size of condors swooped in close, axes and talons at the ready respectively.

Vita dodged, dived, and rolled out of the way, almost dislodging Kyon in the process, as the assembled daemons' maniacal laughter screeched in their ears.

"Your gun!" she yelled. "Give it to me!"

_Don't ask for much, do you?_ He reluctantly unwrapped one of his arms from around her, wincing as his abused muscles protested once more, and fumbled in his trouser pocket for the Cricket, praying that it hadn't fallen out during the flight. Eventually, he managed to grab it, took it out, and placed it in her outstretched hand... just as one of the monstrous crows forgot what species it was supposed to be and stooped into them like a raptor.

Kyon lost his grip, tumbling away with a startled curse. He flapped at the air, more to show willing than out of any serious hope that it might prove useful, and managed to end up facing downwards, watching the distant cavern floor rise to meet him.

Not that anyone intended to let him reach it, though.

A cluster of daemons detached themselves from the main swarm, flying beside him with mocking catcalls. One of them circled beneath him, the darkness that obscured its face yawning wide. It rose (or maybe just slowed down), rushing towards Kyon with its taloned hands outstretched as if attempting an embrace.

Desperately, the student punched downwards, his fist striking where the creature's nose should have been and sinking into the encroaching blackness. It came into contact with... _something_, and the daemon screamed, falling away with its limbs flailing and its kilt flapping around it.

He stared at his arm, faintly relieved that his hand was still attached to it, as the other daemons closed in, snarling._ Of all the ways I expected to go, being torn apart in midair by warped sentient manifestations of human emotion was not one. Funny, that._

Explosions sounded around him, the shockwaves battering every part of his body that _wasn't_ already sore, as the creatures were plucked away one by one. From behind, he heard Graf Eisen's mechanical voice.

"Pferde!" it spat, and Vita was there beside him, effortlessly snapping off shots with the Noisy Cricket.

"Can't leave you to your own devices for one moment, can I, kid?" she asked with a grin. "Grab on now – that face of yours is ugly enough without being splattered across a hundred-metre radius."

She moved in closer, and Kyon did as was suggested. "Thanks, Vita." _That's right... mock the guy who's falling to his death. It's not as if he minds or anything..._

"No problem. Looks like we're going to have to abandon our plans for the old up-and-out, though; there's just too many of those daemonic fuckers around the roof. Time to get... creative."

At that, the student squeezed harder. He would have closed his eyes as well, but fascinated horror and the rushing wind forced them to remain open.

They swooped between two of the ziggurat-like structures rearing from the ground, sparkles on their surfaces resolving themselves into a barrage of projectiles and energy bolts that streaked past them like horizontal rain. Vita didn't bother with her shield, evading the defence systems' attacks with eye-blurring speed as Kyon flopped behind her like a partially-unfastened rear bumper. Gouts of flame appeared on the ziggurats' upper terraces as the Cricket found its mark.

They descended further, the incoming fire lessening as they left the guns' field of traverse. Soon, they were skimming barely a couple of metres above the rocky ground, the huge buildings drifting by on either side like mountains overlooking a valley.

"Are we still being followed, kid?" Vita asked.

Kyon looked back. "Yep. Three big swarms, right behind us."

"Great. What did _we_ do to_ them_?"

"Umm... try to escape from prison, killing, incapacitating, and otherwise injuring several of their compatriots in the process?"

"I mean _apart_ from that!"

"Insult their dress-sense?"

"When did we do that?"

"Right now. Blue-and-gold kilts? Really?"

A snigger. "I could get used to having you around, kid. Hey, is that what I think it is?"

They flew into a depression between four of the smaller buildings that looked to Kyon's eyes like a gigantic drainage basin. A moment later, he realised that that was precisely what it was. Unpleasant greenish-brown stains streaked the sides, and the grate at the bottom was large and imposing enough to resemble a castle's portcullis. Vita dove in for a landing, settling down with military precision. Her taller passenger, meanwhile, was deposited in an undignified heap behind her, further ruining his clothes.

_Lovely – more bruises,_ he thought sourly. _Amazed she hasn't used me as living ammunition or something yet._

"Try to get that gate open," she ordered. "I'll hold them off."

The energy shell reappeared, just as the surrounding emplacements opened fire on them. Kyon crawled over to the grate, looking for a handle or pulley system. All he found was an engraving on one side, eroded but still readable.

'Speak the name of the Queen of Plagues, and enter. Invite her into your heart, and she shall protect you from what lies within.'

_And they can't use _normal_ safety notices because...?_ "Vita, any idea who the 'Queen of Plagues' is?"

Her voice was strained, distracted. "Well, Reigle's their goddess of disease and despair, right? She'd fit. Make it fast, kid – don't know how much longer I can keep this shield up."

"Gotcha. PRAISE REIGLE!"

There was a weird lurching sensation in his stomach as he said it, and the grate began to creak open with glacial slowness, releasing a gust of foul-smelling air.

"We're clear!"

"Glad to hear it. One sec – I'll be right with you."

The daemons had arrived, boiling over the lip of the basin like a tidal wave. The shield vanished, and Vita whipped her hammer to one side.

"Gigantform!" it roared, and the head transformed once more, this time into something as large and blocky as the earlier drill/rocket affair but still recognisably hammer-shaped.

Vita extended a hand, and another iron sphere appeared in front of her, much larger than the ones she had used against the Marine. She drew back Graf Eisen, before slamming it into the projectile with a titanic crash.

"Kometen Fliegen!"

The ball, now a bolt of dull red fire, impacted in the midst of the approaching swarm, creating a huge explosion that blasted bits of daemon and pinwheeling shrapnel all over the place. As the survivors reeled back, stunned, Vita ran towards Kyon, grabbing his wrist and dragging him with her into the waiting darkness of the drainage chute.

_So we're trying to escape through an underground flue that may lead nowhere at all. Great. Wonderful. If our next obstacle starts calling himself 'Rupert of Hentzau', I'm going to scream and start attacking things at random._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Because I thought this fic needed more magical backside-kicking and shout-outs to nineteenth-century literature. Don't judge me.


	13. Fireside Chat

**12. Fireside Chat**

The walls of the chute skidded past on either side, details like ladders and maintenance hatches disappearing just as fast as they appeared. Kyon had seldom felt the strange sensation of being tugged_ upwards _by air resistance, and it was not one that he wished to repeat any time soon. The further down they went, the warmer (and more noisome) the surrounding atmosphere became, as if they were diving into the stomach of some huge, alien creature – and given the peculiar architecture that the gods favoured, that might not have been all that far off the mark.

An enormous explosion sounded far behind them, causing the walls to shake and backlighting them with a dull orange glow.

"Pferde!" Graf Eisen announced once more, and Vita accelerated, the chute becoming an indistinct blur around them.

"What just happened?" Kyon asked, having to force his mouth open against the roaring wind.

"Left them a present," Vita gasped. "Good news is, should block off their pursuit. Bad news – we've likely got a whole lot of rubble coming after us. Oh, and I really hope you had that titchy gun of yours insured."

He looked back, and immediately wished he hadn't. A wall of dust and assorted debris bore down on them, boiling along the tunnel like steam. Trying to take his mind off it, he turned back to Vita – well, the back of her head, anyway.

"Incidentally, what does 'pferde' _mean_, exactly? Just curious."

"... 'Horse Speed'," she replied grudgingly. "If you wish to make some smartass remark about it, go right ahead. I _might_ even keep holding onto you afterwards."

"Who, me? Wouldn't dream of it."

They emerged into the drainage system's sump, a huge chamber whose vaulted walls and ceiling had an odd, fleshy appearance to them. Vita veered upwards just in time to avoid both the unhealthy-looking sludge that half-filled the room and the prophesied rubble that had followed them all the way down. Droplets of liquid splattered them as the debris hit the pool, leaving an unpleasant itching, burning sensation where they contacted skin.

The diminutive mage came to a halt near the roof, looking around at the mass of pipes and chutes that fed into the sump. "Which way now, kid?"

"Whichever one looks like it has the least of that gunk flowing through it, I say," Kyon replied from below, desperately trying not to look up for fear of receiving a hammer-based enema.

"Smart choice. How about... this one?"

The indicated tunnel was cracked and age-worn, bearing little evidence of the strange corruption that had infested the rest of the sewer system – or, at least, not the same _kind_ of evidence. As they flew into it, he saw pallid vegetation that coated significant parts of the walls and seemed to move without the assistance of the wind.

After a few dozen metres, the sewer levelled out to a comfortable walking gradient, which Vita duly took advantage of. Kyon was ready this time, and managed to land _mostly_ on his feet. Pleasingly, the sewer water here was merely foul-smelling rather than actively harmful like the stuff in the main sump, though he didn't like the brownish stains it left on the knees of his trousers.

"Looks like another room up ahead," Vita observed.

Said room turned out to be a maintenance station, a brutally functional concrete affair lined with various crude-looking gauges and control systems. There was an enclosed area to one side that apparently contained living quarters for extended stays, whilst the strange-looking runes etched on the floor presumably acted as wards to keep the corruption away. For some reason, said runes reminded Kyon rather of the decoration that had adorned Tzintchi's clothing when he came to visit. The air was cool, especially when compared to the rest of the sewers.

Beside him, Vita rapped the floor with Eisen's pommel in a satisfied manner. "Think we just hit the jackpot. We can hold out here, wait until things die down upstairs, and then make a break for it. Easy."

"Think we might want to check those quarters out, though," the student replied. "This place seems a little too good to be true – I wouldn't be surprised if it had a few nasty surprises lying around."

"Fair point." A sidelong grin. "I'll go in first – may not have the shirt for it anymore, but the hair's about the right colour."

"You're a sci-fi fan, then?" he asked as he followed her in.

She shrugged. "Hayate was a good host, but she was still a ten-year-old to start out with, and not a healthy one at that. Sometimes, we had to provide our own entertainment. You would not _believe_ the size of the DVD library I collected."

They looked around. The little room was dingy, but not uninhabitable. Four folding beds were arranged around the walls, and there was even a primitive-looking radio on one of the raised surfaces. The stove was clearly broken, but there were still a couple of spare tanks of fuel for it. All in all, the place gave the impression of being abandoned, but not too long ago. Perhaps it had been adopted by the new ownership in the earliest days of their stay, before they created their own version to better suit their needs. That would certainly explain the runes.

They opened one of the cupboards, and stared at the food. The food stared back.

It was some time before Kyon spoke. "First order of business, we steal some provisions."

"Agreed," Vita responded, sounding shaken. "Before that, though, we need to settle in. You get the beds ready, I'll secure the site."

She wandered off, leaving him with the daunting challenge of freeing the bunks from a daunting array of catches and straps. He took a quick inventory – everything ached, his clothes were ruined, his arms were wobbling with exhaustion, and on top of it all, he seemed to have the beginnings of a cold.

He set to work, almost losing a few fingers in the process, and soon the beds were, if not pristine, certainly usable. _What do you know – that camping trip Haruhi dragged me along for paid off after all._

With that done, all that remained was leaning back on his own bed, sipping brackish tapwater from a cracked mug, and watching as Vita attempted to start a fire using an empty ration tin, assorted vegetation, a generous helping of stove fuel, and, of course, her hammer. Judging by the steady litany of inventive pseudo-Germanic cursing, it wasn't going well.

Eventually, through the simple expedient of banging the first and last components together, she managed to generate sufficient sparks to create a small, smoky, and noxious yet nevertheless welcome blaze. Job done, she walked a short way from their makeshift camp and extended Graf Eisen in front of her.

"Barrier Field, expand," she commanded.

"Gefängnis der Magie," the hammer responded, and a dark sphere pulsed out, giving everything within eyesight a greyish, washed-out tone like an overcast sky minus the sky.

She turned back to Kyon, who had sidled over to the fire and was regarding her with a quizzical look.

"Should keep the little beasties out, and the big ones will make enough noise coming in that we'll know they're coming. Always helps to take a few extra precautions."

She sat next to him, and he passed her a second mug. The light was dim, but he could see that she was trembling ever so slightly.

"Are you all right?"

A rueful smile. "Just remembering, is all. That stuff I said to you, back then... it wasn't something they put in my head. It came from _inside_, deep within me. There was a part of me that wanted everything they offered, that wanted to kill for the sake of killing, to take Hayate and..."

She trailed off. Instinctively, Kyon put an arm around her shoulders, and wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disconcerted that it was not torn off immediately afterwards.

"Look, I know there's some pretty dark stuff in there. I've done some bad, bad things in my time – and when you've lived as long as I have, that's saying something. It's just that... well, having it all shoved in my face again isn't the most pleasant of experiences. Especially when I thought I'd put it behind me years ago. Was that all a lie? Pretending to be human, being a good little girl, denying my true nature... have I just been delaying the inevitable?"

_Amateur psychology, don't fail me now..._ "Look, Vita, you're not alone with this. Everyone has these dark thoughts – that's why the gods are so fond of turning people with them. They almost got me that way, too. Several times, in fact. Frankly, I'm surprised that that's as bad as it got, given what you've told me about yourself. They're just that, though – thoughts. They're no more your 'true nature' than your fondness for dodgy Sixties shows, your memories of your time with Hayate, or, hell, even your habit of verbally abusing poor, blameless high-schoolers. It's what you _act_ on that matters. That's what makes you who you are. The fact that you're so upset about it should be proof that you're not some sort of monster – I'd be far more worried if you were revelling in the evildoing and complaining about how you had to play nice all the time."

She looked up at him and smiled. He could see tears glistening on her cheeks, and she suddenly looked very little like the living engine of destruction that had broken them out of the Palace's prison wing.

"Thanks, Kyon. I don't know, it's something I'm going to have to think about, but... thanks."

After a brief silence, he retracted his arm. Welcome or not, really seven hundred years old or not, he couldn't help but find something vaguely uncomfortable about hugging an eight-year-old who wasn't a family member for an extended period of time.

"It was weird, though," she said eventually. "Despite all the horrible stuff they did, despite what they tried to get me to do... they were almost being, well, _kind_ to me. It was as if they thought-"

"-they were doing you a favour?" Kyon finished for her. "Yeah, I heard that one before. Guess she wasn't lying about everything, then."

"Who?"

"Maria Vargas. I'd be surprised if you'd heard of her. Nice lady, right until she tried to decapitate me."

Another contemplative pause, which Kyon finally decided to break.

"So who's this Hayate person you keep talking about, then?"

"Long answer or short answer?"

"Short answer."

"She's the girl who made me a person."

"OK, poetic but uninformative. Long answer?"

"Well, you know I mentioned I was a sentient magical program, right?"

"Obliquely, yeah. Hence the centuries-spanning lifespan."

"Bingo. Thing is, I'm not an independent being – well, not entirely, anyway. I'm a defence subroutine of an extremely powerful artefact called the 'Tome of the Night Sky'. Think your basic stereotypical magical grimoire, only it operates more like a technosorcerous computer."

"With you so far."

"Well, the Tome, like most sophisticated artefacts, is pretty much a living being, and like most creatures, it has a distinct life-cycle. It appears somewhere, binds itself to a master, and sends out its guardian programs, the Wolkenritter – that's 'Cloud Knights', in case you were wondering – to harvest magical energy and fill its pages. Once it's complete, it tanks its master up to the gills with power, and they get to play around with it until either they die or the link is otherwise severed. Usually the former, though."

"And Hayate was one of these masters, yes?" Kyon surmised. "_Mistresses_, I mean."

"It's 'master', technically. The term's gender-neutral, though we mostly just ignore that – even Signum, these days."

"Ah, I see."

"Anyway, yeah, she was. Still is, in fact. Thing was, though, she was a bit different to most of our masters. Usually we get scholars, aspiring warlords, downtrodden wage-slaves... people with something to gain, basically, who wouldn't object to having a magical superweapon at their disposal. This time, though, we ended up with a lonely ten-year-old-orphan. She didn't want us, the Wolkenritter, as spies, bodyguards, or assassins – she just wanted a family. For that matter, so did we. I might say we adopted her, but really it was the other way round. Life was good – for once in our long, long lives, we were happy."

"It didn't last, though, I take it?"

Another sad smile. "Nothing that nice ever does. By that point, you see, the Tome's programming was corrupted. Even its name had changed – we knew it as the Book of Darkness. Instead of empowering Hayate, it slowly drained away her life, manifesting itself as a creeping paralysis of the legs. We grew desperate – we knew she wouldn't want it, but we saw no choice other than to fill the Book, hoping that the power it would grant her might stave off the corruption that was slowly killing her. So we went harvesting."

"Harvesting?"

"Stealing the Linker Cores – the magical energy sources – of other living beings. Mostly, it didn't do permanent damage, just put them in hospital for a bit, but accidents happened. We got careless, attracted the attention of the Time-Space Administration Bureau. They're this big, nebulous organisation, somewhere between an interdimensional police force, a democratic government, and a technosorcerous military academy, though that makes them sound a bit more sinister than they are. Than _most_ of them are, anyway."

"Magical Men in Black, gotcha."

"Something like that. Anyway, they started sending enforcers after us, including a couple of irritating kids called Nanoha Takamachi and Fate Testarossa. We didn't want to listen at first, but they told us more about the Book. As part of it, we were corrupted too, particularly our memories. Not only had we forgotten the Book of Darkness's original name, but we didn't know what it did these days when it was completed. Its secondary self-defence programs had gone into overdrive – once they were fully powered up, they killed our masters, turning them into unstoppable monstrosities that could ravage entire worlds. Even if someone _did_ manage to bring them down, the Book'd just reappear somewhere else, starting the cycle all over again."

Kyon winced. "Ouch. Can't imagine you took_ that_ well."

"You can say that again. Anyway, things got complicated. One of the Bureau's top brass had got it into his head that he'd found a way to stop the Book once and for all, and deliberately triggered its activation to put his plan into action. Luckily for us, their ground crew, particularly the two little punks I mentioned earlier, weren't exactly sold on the idea. They dealt with the physical aspect, while Hayate – get this – managed to _talk the Book down_. I'll repeat that in case you missed it; little orphan girl gets absorbed by centuries-old cosmic horror and _persuades it to stop_." Her face glowed with remembered pride.

"So long story short, we and the TSAB detachment managed to excise the corrupted code, restoring Hayate to full health and granting her the full power of the Tome of the Night Sky. It wasn't easy, and the Tome's central personality had to sacrifice herself in order to keep the damned thing from respawning, but it was pretty much a happy ending to the whole mess. Hayate joined the Bureau's military branch a few years later, and started accruing promotions like nobody's business. We, of course, were with her every step of the way. Matter of fact, she was running the operation when I got captured. That's why I need to escape – I know she'll be coming back for me, and I don't want these devious bastards luring her into a trap."

She glanced at Kyon.

"What about you, kid? Got anyone waiting for you back home?"

"Several people, actually," he replied. "It's a long story, though, and I'm not really the narrator-type. Tell you what – I'll give you the whole thing tomorrow."

"I'll hold you to that," she replied mock-seriously. "Come on, then – let's see what sort of mess you made of the beds."

"Can't be any worse than your fire."

"Hey, I got it lit in the end, didn't I?"

"If by 'got it lit' you mean 'created the single most reliable source of lung cancer in the hemisphere', then I'd have to say yes, yes you did. Seriously, what did you _put_ in that thing?"

"Oh, so you think you could do any better?"

"Vita, I think there are species of _insect_ that could do better."

"Look, do you _want_ this hammer rammed up your ass?"

"Pff, that's your solution to everything. Indicates deeply-rooted Freudian issues, I'm sure."

"Oh, shut it."

They continued bickering amiably all the way back to the living quarters, where no sooner had Vita gone through the door than she dived onto the nearest bed and fell asleep, not even bothering with the sheets.

Kyon studied her a moment. Sleeping, she really _did_ look like a child. He took off his jacket and pulled it over her, creating a makeshift blanket. That done, he returned to his own bed, got in, and closed his eyes. Soon he too was asleep.

The nightmares returned, but he'd been expecting them.

***

Outside the quarters, a slight gust of wind whispered through the maintenance section. It seemed to pause over the runes on the floor, creating an almost-imperceptible flicker of light that left them superficially unchanged, but a hypothetical observer who had been there to watch the transition would have noticed that something was _missing_ from the contorted inscriptions afterwards.

One by one, the wards against entropy and disease were deactivated. The wind departed, carrying the faint echoes of a god's laughter.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, I'm afraid that's the last we'll be seeing of Kyon and Vita for a little while. Make no mistake, I (and the rest of the cast) haven't forgotten them, and they _will_ be making a reappearance, but for now, their part in this story is done.

So this chapter was a bit of a change in pace. How am I doing on the various characters and their interactions with each other so far, would you say? Again, feedback always welcome.

See you next week, when we will be encountering hikers, assassins, and blowfish alternatives as the dimensional crisis escalates yet further.


	14. Immigration Duty

**13. Immigration Duty**

In a place that was not a place, home of impossible colours, non-Euclidean geometries, and a dozen other Lovecraftian clichés, the Data Integration Thought Entity resided, observing the universe with dispassionate mechanical curiosity.

The invaders' area of influence had expanded significantly in a short period of time, making limited use of Haruhi Suzumiya's powers to affect systems in an ever-widening sphere around Earth. The Sol system itself was almost unrecognisable, a festering sore in the mathematical purity of space. Gigantic, bizarre architecture stretched between its planets, shipyards and war factories built on an unprecedented scale, kept in one piece only by gross violations of the laws of physics.

After much debate, the dispute among the Entity's Interfaces, Administrators, and other components had concluded. Though it was agreed that expulsion of the invaders and alliance with the TSAB and its associates would be the wisest course of action, the Entity was unwilling to tip its metaphorical hand with an overt assault straight away, instead reporting hostile troop movements to the Bureau and concealing their scout vessels from the enemy.

The thing was, though most simulations the Entity had run indicated a high probability of success when running a deletion operation against the forces of Chaos, such an action would also eliminate their potential usefulness. As things stood, the Bureau had a mostly-reliable (and more importantly, secret) source of intelligence around which to prepare their counteroffensive, and the Entity itself had the opportunity to study phenomena far outside its existing knowledge-base. In particular, the 'warp-energy' that Chaos was fond of using was proving most interesting.

There had been... resistance, though. Despite the decision being encoded as a behavioural edict, a number of Interfaces tasked with observing Earth had cooperated with Bureau agents to evacuate several thousand humans (primarily espers and stranded time-travellers) from that planet in the few days before it had been completely engulfed.

Such a hostile, overt, and above all _premature_ action was a grievous breach of protocol, a form of treason in fact (insofar as it had a _concept_ of treason). The Entity had been forced to conclude that the Interfaces in question had malfunctioned, and had deleted those it could, erasing their backups as well in case the aberrance had spread. One of the units had presented a problem, though – specifically, the renegade Humanoid Interface Yuki Nagato.

On the one hand, said Interface had been the likely instigator of the rebellion, and had more than enough transgressions to her name to warrant deletion ten times over besides (in fact, even her self-identification with a gender-determinate pronoun was a fairly worrying sign). On the other, she was under the protection of a being who had explained in no uncertain terms that harming her would result in swift and apocalyptic retribution. Faced with this dilemma, the Entity had elected to contain her in a secure data vault pending further developments. So far, this had worked reasonably well, as evidenced by the continued existence of the Entity and, indeed, the universe as a whole.

Its etheric sensors picked up a space-time distortion of a familiar pattern – more ships were arriving from the invaders' home dimension. There were six of them, smaller, more ungainly, and lighter-armed than the warships that had thus far preceded them. Freighters, perhaps, or survey vessels. They were already recharging their warp-engines, and judging by their trajectory, they were headed for TSAB territory.

After a nanosecond's deliberation, the Entity alerted its Interfaces on Mid-Childa.

***

The Deep Space Surveillance department of the Navigation Bureau was a fairly small outfit crammed into several of the less desirable compartments of the TSAB's enormous, spaceborne central office. Its staff were considered an odd bunch even by Bureau standards, spending most of their time wrestling with needlessly complex astrophysical equations and fiddling with their instrumentation, a bizarre hotchpotch of gleaming ultramodern technology, obsolete junk, and barely-understood Ancient Belkan artefacts.

They were not, in short, the sort of people one would expect to become a collective lynchpin of a pan-dimensional intervention procedure, but in the past few weeks, that was exactly what they had become. Their list of duties had expanded rapidly, ranging from skimming energy readings off neighbouring universes to performing long-range surveys of the Great Wall.

In all that time, though, they had never had a request like _this_.

"I'm sorry, sir, but can you please repeat that?" Dr. Solara Kamri asked, hoping that he'd misheard.

"Six Chaos vessels are either approaching Bureau territory or have already entered it," the High Command comms officer said again, sounding almost indecently bored given the situation. "We want you to find them. Will that be a problem?"

"Umm... no," Kamri replied. "It might be a _bit_ difficult, but I think we can manage it. Can I get you an update in the next half-hour, please?"

"That would be acceptable," the comms officer agreed, severing the link with a haughty disdain that managed to convey itself all the way to the DSS department office.

The scientist sagged back in his chair. Explaining to one's superiors (particularly the formidable Fleet Admiral Thundra) that what they were asking for was impossible was not a course of action conducive to job security. That said, attempting to produce a miracle in thirty minutes wouldn't exactly be conducive to his mental wellbeing, either.

Sometimes, Kamri wished he could just fade back into obscurity.

"Rejoice, people," he said, turning to his waiting staff, "it's needle-in-a-haystack time."

One of the senior techs winced. "Oh, Kaiser's blood, we're not going to be enumerating quasars again, are we?"

Kamri grinned mirthlessly. "Nope. Better. We're going to be tracking fleet movements. Specifically, six ships of indeterminate size which may or may not all be together at the moment."

The tech's jaw dropped. "But that's-"

"Impossible? Welcome to five minutes ago, Touran." He clapped his hands. "Move it, folks – we have a job to do."

The DSS team scattered to their posts – all except for Touran, who was still staring at her boss incredulously.

"Chief, do we even have some sort of identifier for these ships? Anything at all that might distinguish them from your average background radiation?"

Kamri pondered this. "Well, I hear their dimensional drives are pretty weird. That might help. One moment – I'll go make a call. In the meantime, you hold the fort."

She inclined her head in acquiescence. "You owe me, chief."

_Think I'm going to be hearing a lot of that soon,_ he thought to himself as he wandered back to his quarters.

Once inside, he opened a link to an old friend now serving on the _Eventide_.

_Fred, you there?_

_Sol, you old dog! Long time no see! I presume this isn't a social call?_

'_Fraid not – sorry, Fred. Got a bit of a problem over here, and I need the combat logs from your ship. Specifically, any intel you picked up on Chaos warships._

_Wait, are you seriously telling me that you want to obtain under-the-counter copies of classified information? _Quartermaster Sergeant Jones asked reproachfully. _I'll pretend I didn't hear that, Sol._

_Sorry, Fred, I just thought-_

_A man could get in a lot of trouble doing that, you know._

_Yes, yes, I-_

_And I obviously can't get involved – I have a family to consider, after all. We both do._

_Look, forget I said-_

_Which is why I'm going to have to ask you to strenuously avoid your computer's inbox for the next few minutes. Can't have you catching a glimpse of something you shouldn't, after all._

Kamri breathed a sigh of relief. _Thanks, Fred._

_Don't mention it. No, seriously, don't – I'm not too keen on spending the rest of my life in an orbital detention facility, you know._

There was a brief pause.

_Does Mrs. Kamri still do those delectable chocolate chip biscuits, though? I ask merely out of curiosity._

The doctor smiled broadly. _I'll have her cook up a batch just for you, Fred._

He cut the link, and checked the inbox. Sure enough, the logs were there. One quick mnemonic charm later, and they were in his head as well. That done, he deleted the electronic copy. One should always cover one's footprints, after all.

Things had not progressed far when he returned to the DSS office. Touran gave him a weary mock-salute as he entered, the hapless junior tech she'd been berating temporarily forgotten.

"Any pearls of wisdom to dispense on this little conundrum, oh glorious leader?" she asked acidly.

_No respect, I tell you..._ "Actually, yes, I do. I looked over the data – you didn't hear me say that, by the way – and those ships seem to have a dimensional signature roughly akin to a small, mobile patch of Chaotic Space. You know, like when those moron ecoterrorists on Varduk Prime pressed the wrong button on their shiny new Belkan superweapon."

Touran brightened up. "A localised breach? That's actually... kind of feasible. Maybe if we fine-tune a couple of the Farsight relays, wake up the Warped Mirror... yeah, we can do this. We can actually _do_ this!"

The junior tech raised a hand, understandably hesitant to reinvite his superior's wrath. "Umm... sirs? There might be a bit of a problem if you want to use the Mirror. We ran out of live blowfish yesterday, and I'm not sure where to get more."

"Try the seafood restaurant on the second deck," Kamri suggested absently. "They should have something close enough. Ladies and gentlemen, we are _back in business_!"

***

TSAB Naval Command was a veritable hive of activity, aides, technicians, and flunkies scurrying to and fro with near-panicked urgency as they attempted to coordinate a pan-dimensional mobilisation involving no less than four major interstellar civilisations. In the midst of it all, the desk of Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra, commander of Operation Guardian and de facto leader of the entire intervention, was a veritable island of calm, in that only one person was shouting at any one time and he generally knew what he was doing.

"Wilson, have those pasty longhairs in DSS found those bloody ships yet?" he demanded in the strident tone of a man who had never heard of the term 'indoor voice'.

Commander Albert Wilson (real name: Carlton Firenza, but nobody called him that any more) polished his monocle nervously. Said monocle wasn't medically required, strictly speaking, but Wilson felt he had an image to maintain. Everyone in the Bureau had their own little eccentricities, and if his most efficient aide clung firmly to the belief that he was some sort of British manservant (whatever that was – the admiral had never been terribly interested in Earthborn culture), then who was Thundra to judge? Other than his commanding officer, of course, and entitled to all the judging he could muster, but he mostly chose to ignore that.

"Yes, sir. Four minutes ago, to be exact. At the time of the report, two of them were in dimensional space near Universe Sigma-Nine, and did not appear to be going anywhere soon. The other four remain unaccounted for."

Thundra shook his leonine head. "Wonderful. Bloody wonderful. We got any ships in that region?"

"I believe the Second and Third Fleets are patrolling in the general area, sir."

"Good. Send them in to intercept. All of them."

"... All of them, sir?"

"One ship blasted a quarter of a galaxy into submission. Who knows what two are capable of? No risks, Wilson."

"Understood, sir."

As his aide bustled off, Thundra stared at the display. _Where did the others go?_

***

The Iruel-class transports were decades ahead of their time – literally, in fact, thanks to a cloned workforce and judicious use of warp-magic. They were the heralds of what was to come, a vast armada that would claim the multiverse in the name of Chaos. The gods now faced (or rather, were preparing to face) genuine opposition – no longer could they limit themselves, dealing with threats and opportunities on their own terms.

That wasn't to say, though, that they had _completely_ abandoned subtlety.

"Release payload," the commander rasped through his altered voicebox.

He watched in satisfaction as the clone-servitors manning the bridge did as he commanded, their augmented limbs operating the various consoles with mathematical efficiency. This voyage was as much a test for them as it was for the ships they crewed, and so far they were functioning with steady, unimaginative competence – precisely what they had been designed for, in fact.

The transport's cargo bay opened, revealing row upon row of needle-like craft. One by one, they launched, their thrusters flaring in the silence of dimensional space, and took up formation around their parent vessel.

Antennae extended from the hull, mapping out the surrounding universes. At a gesture from the commander, a string of co-ordinates was downloaded into each of the needle-ships. They set off to their destinations, their null-fields and ECM systems activating to conceal them from sensors both magical and technological.

"Payload deployed," he reported. "What about you, Kowalski?"

"Sent all mine off as well," the commander of their sister-vessel responded. "The other ships?"

He checked his console. "One sec... green across the board. Mission success. Time to leave, folks."

"No argument here," Kowalski agreed. "Hey, did you get a look inside the cryopods on those things?"

"Nope – fused with the chair a couple of days ago. Kind of restricts my movements. You know how it is. What was in there?"

"Scary stuff, man. Scary stuff. Almost feel sorry for the poor sods we're unleashing 'em on."

"They decided to oppose the gods. Their fault."

"Right. Jumping in three – you ready?"

"Way ahead of you. As always."

With that, the two transports left Bureau space as abruptly as they had arrived. A few minutes later, those sent to New Republic and Spiral Nation territory did likewise.

***

"They're retreating, sir," Wilson reported.

"Can we catch them?" Thundra asked.

"Our ships are certainly faster, but they have a significant lead. We would be dangerously extending a significant portion of our forces for questionable gain."

"Fair point – the _Eventide_ reports _did_ say they're fond of playing it sneaky. Pull the fleets back – no risks. Still no sign of the others?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

The admiral growled in frustration as only a military officer pushing retirement could. "Just what the hell were they _up_ to?"

"Hard to be sure, sir. It may have just been a simple scouting mission. DSS observed a small dimensional ripple, but that might have been a side-effect of the drives they're using. Even with the data provided by the Entity, we really don't know that much about their technology."

Thundra shook his head. "Too many 'may's and 'might's, Wilson. Is it too much to ask for a war where I have some idea of the enemy's motives and capabilities?"

He looked up again, a sour smile on his face.

"What was the next thing on their schedule? Ah, yes, those Spiral maniacs are sending over a techie of their own. Leeron or something. Just file him under 'big, loud, and unhealthily obsessed with drills', will you? Covers most of those idiots to a tee. Besides, we have more important things to attend to."

"Yes, sir. Would you like some scones?"

"_Wilson_..."

"Sorry, sir."

***

Luke Skywalker sat up in bed, sweating. He had seen something in his dreams, a dark rain descending upon the galaxy. He looked inside, but it was gone. Beside him, Mara stirred and muttered a sleepy, unintelligible question.

"Nothing, dear. Just a nightmare."

_I hope._

***

In the hills above the Spiral capital, a shadowy figure watched the city through silver-hued, augmented eyes. He was dressed like a hiker, with a long bag slung over his shoulder. This made sense, because the man he had taken the clothes from had _been_ a hiker. Now, though, that man was naked at the bottom of a riverbed, a bullet through his brain. The area's indigenous carnivores would dispose of him soon enough.

The new arrival wasn't just admiring the view, though it was no doubt spectacular. Lines, symbols, letters, and numbers danced in front of his vision, mapping out roads, vantage points, and important buildings, which were then stored, pristine, in his eidetic memory. In less than thirty seconds, he had calculated lines of attack and infiltration for anything from a small special-forces team to several armoured regiments.

The gods' signal had not come yet, but he wanted to be ready when it did.

***

Stella Kei was wandering aimlessly through Mid-Childa's main shopping district, soaking in the atmosphere of the bustling metropolis. It had been a tough day at the office, and she was in the mood for some nice, soothing retail therapy.

She was walking past one of the district's innumerable side-alleys when something long, black, and vaguely serpentine shot out, wrapping itself around her nose and mouth and dragging her off the street. She couldn't fight or scream – in fact, she could barely breathe. Outside the alley, shoppers wandered past, quite unaware of what was going on scant metres away.

A hand plunged into her forehead, creating a strange tingling feeling. After a few moments, it withdrew, and an impossibly sharp blade slashed across her throat.

Her corpse sagged in her captor's grip, and was dragged back further into the alley. Five minutes and some unpleasantly organic noises later, Stella Kei walked out as if nothing had happened. An attentive observer might have noticed that she'd put on a little weight, but that was about it.

As her victim's body was rapidly broken down by her powerful stomach acids, the Divine Assassin consulted her stolen memories. Stella had been a junior clerk attached to a unit called the First Expeditionary Force, under one Colonel Hayate Yagami. _The ones who made first contact with us... _She smiled, silently praising Tzintchi for her good fortune.

This should be very interesting.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Welcome back for another week, and another three chapters, as the preparations for war truly get underway. Reviews as welcome as ever.


	15. Back to Work

**14. Back to Work**

The Infinite Library was technically part of the TSAB central office, but in reality quite separate, a relic of Al-Hazard that employed the peculiarities of dimensional space to create an information repository that was a dimension in and of itself. In fact, it used rather similar principles to the Eye of Tzintchi, though neither side of the conflict was aware of this peculiar irony.

It was said that the Library contained all the knowledge in the multiverse, and indeed books, shelves and sometimes even entire sections would simply appear and disappear without warning or even outside intervention. As such, it was theoretically possible to keep reasonably up-to-date with interdimensional events simply by observing shifts in the Library's structure, provided one knew what one was looking for.

This curious function of the ancient pocket dimension had become particularly important during the preparatory stages of Operation Guardian. It allowed the Bureau to gather information on the enemy's activities independent of the Integrated Data Entity's Humanoid Interfaces, who were both limited in usefulness beyond what was going on in their (admittedly strategically-vital) universe and disconcertingly reticent regarding certain subjects. It wasn't perfect by any means – even if you knew and could find what you sought, information from Wild Space tended to be garbled, incomplete, or simply non-existent, and the territories beyond the Great Wall were as much of a mystery as ever. Besides that, there was generally a notable time-gap between an event happening and someone writing something down about it. Still, it was better than nothing.

At any one point these days, there seemed to be hundreds (if not thousands) of assorted staff from various departments poring through the shelves, their telepathic communications weaving together in such a way as to make specific conversation virtually impossible. It was for this reason that Nanoha and Hayate had decided to visit in person.

The entrance to the Library was clogged with a sea of humanity, almost-humanity, and not-really-humanity-at-all, either staggering under piles of documents, wandering along with the sort of blank expressions that indicated some futile attempt at telepathic communication, or just being generally loud and energetic. As they approached, the two young women activated their Barrier Jackets, illuminating the surrounding area with a quick flash of pink and white light. Were it not for the dampening field that permeated the station for safety purposes, quite a few people could have been blinded on the spot.

A path was immediately cleared. The Bureau's Ace of Aces tended to get that reaction, and one of the aptly-nicknamed 'citykiller' SS+ mages even more so. Both nodded and smiled politely as they walked past, quietly hoping that the crowd's actions had been motivated by respect more than simple terror. They lifted off the ground just as they passed into the Library, feeling the lurching sensation in their stomachs that indicated the huge station's artificial gravity had disappeared.

Inside, the pocket dimension resembled a literate hybrid between a beehive and a digestive tract. Shelf-lined tunnels branched and spiralled into the distance, each big enough to fly a light destroyer through. Gleaming white structures like ossified vines occupied the space between the shelves, obscuring the more distant parts of the network. There was no floor, which wasn't that much of a problem for most given how basic a magical talent flight was, though handholds had been fitted on the walls just in case. Swarms of people crawled across the shelves, dressed in the uniforms of a dozen departments, as well as one large orang-utan who _wasn't_ wearing a uniform, but was moving so purposefully that they assumed he was supposed to be there.

"How are we going to find him in all this?" Hayate asked.

Nanoha jerked a thumb at a pale green light approaching from one of the tributaries. "There's your answer, I think."

The light slowed down, and resolved itself into the smiling form of the Chief Librarian, Yuuno Scrya. A string of hefty-looking volumes orbited him like papery satellites, and lines of verdant text scrolled up the inside of his glasses.

"That was fast," Hayate commented.

"Upgraded the security systems a few months ago," he explained. "Bunch of far-right nutjobs broke in to raid the Weaponry section. Almost got away with it, too – we found blueprints for some pretty vicious stuff on them. Anyways, just picked up a couple of massive energy signatures coming through the southern entrance, and decided to pop over and see what was up. We're not getting many folks above S-rank around here at the moment, you see."

He gestured, and the books flew back to the shelves in perfect formation.

"Anyway, it's good to see you two. Sorry I haven't had much time to chat lately – as you can see, things are rather chaotic around here. Our friends the gods have been up to their old tricks again; we've been reading the fluctuations, and it seems they hit another universe about a week ago."

Nanoha's stomach lurched again – this time, though, it had nothing to do with abrupt gravity failure. "What happened?"

"Couple of minor skirmishes, plus the terminal destabilisation of a galaxy-spanning empire ruled by a code called the Praxis. Think your basic militaristic dictatorship, only on a grander scale than average. Censorship, slavery, genocide... all the good stuff. Oh, and that wasn't just my personal prejudices formulating that list – they have some _really_ unpleasant methods of information-control. _Had_, rather."

"So they toppled a nasty government," Hayate said. "What's the bad news?"

Yuuno pushed up his glasses with the fussy precision that inevitably heralded a transition into scholar mode. "You never read the books I got you for your birthday, did you? A civilisation like that – and I use the term loosely – _never_ goes down tidily. Too many rivalries, too many people with blood on their hands, something to gain, or both. Your average evil empire isn't just comprised of sadistic rulers and a noble, downtrodden underclass, not if it survives as long as this one did. As soon as they sparked the fire, the Chaos forces did what they always do, and simply moved on. No picking up of the pieces, no smoothing of the transition, no nothing. Two days later, eighteen billion people were dead. It's probably far, far more by now."

_Eighteen billion... that's three Earths._ Nanoha tried to imagine it, but couldn't. _Those who started it... they couldn't have known that would happen. Could they? What would they stand to gain from that sort of slaughter?_

Yuuno broke the silence. "I'm sorry – that wasn't what you came here to discuss, was it? I seem to have picked up a habit of giving lectures at inopportune times – it's endemic to academia, I'm afraid. May I ask what it actually was?"

Relieved at the change of subject, Nanoha handed him a datapad. "We've been having issues with interdimensional travel regarding our new allies – it's a technology-compatibility thing, from what I hear. High Command thought you could help; the relevant information's all in the pad."

The librarian scanned through, his glasses performing the scrolling-text trick again. "Good grief – omega-level clearance? Well, that explains why they sent you two along. It says I'll be liaising with a Spiral scientist – may I ask who he is?"

"His name's Leeron," Hayate explained. "By all accounts, he's a technological genius, responsible for a frankly disproportionate number of their more exotic innovations. On the other hand, he's also a little... eccentric. Here's the photo we got given."

An image floated in the air, projected from her staff. It showed an ageless, androgynous, and vaguely piscine-looking individual wearing heavy eyeshadow blowing a kiss towards the camera.

"I... see." Yuuno said eventually. "Don't worry, though – I've dealt with academics before. As long as this one doesn't have to be repeatedly convinced that he's not some form of shellfish, we should be fine."

He waved to a pair of familiars hovering some distance away. "Aria, Lotte, I'm heading out for a while. You're in charge. Please don't molest _too_ many of the younger visitors, all right?"

They giggled and waved back.

"Good grief, are those the _Lieze twins_?" Hayate asked, clearly taken aback – not that Nanoha could blame her. "What are they doing here?"

The librarian looked apologetic. "Sorry, Hayate, I know your history with them, but... well, Admiral Graham died last year – natural causes, believe it or not – and they had nowhere else to go, so I decided to take my cues from that speech you gave in Parliament a while back. You remember, the one about how everyone deserves a shot at redemption? They're in the rehab program now – the library job's for the community service aspect. I figured that if we were going to excise some of the poison good old Gil was feeding them before the Book of Darkness Incident, late was better than never."

A dozen emotions flickered across Hayate's face at once, too fast for Nanoha to track. She could sympathise entirely – encountering the people who had killed your only real family (albeit temporarily) in order to turn you into a ravening, world-destroying monstrosity and then tried to bring about _your_ death as well could not be easy.

"I see," the colonel said in a calm, level voice. "Yuuno, I both commend and fully endorse this little project of yours. I'd be delighted to see them properly reformed... which is why I must ask you to keep me away from them at all times, because if I encounter them alone, _I will not be held responsible for my actions_."

"I'll keep that in mind," Yuuno replied solemnly, placing the datapad in a coat pocket.

He looked up and smiled. "My, this conversation does keep taking a turn for the gloomy, doesn't it? And people wonder why I never host parties. All right – where is this Leeron at the moment?"

* * *

"You know what I love about thish plashe?" the man sitting next to Leeron slurred. "Sh'got everything. Intershtellar capital, all the li'l backwater comfortsh of Earth, an' _nobody_ makesh fun of my name."

He was a twitchy, grubby individual with wavy red hair whose face appeared to be swept back from his nose. Empty glasses were crowded in front of him, many of them having contained drinks that the Spiral had never heard of before they had been ordered.

"Oh?" he asked, intrigued. "What's your name, if I may ask?"

The man told him. Leeron crinkled his forehead, bemused.

"What's so funny about that?"

"You shee? That'sh exshactly what I mean!" He blinked owlishly. "Thish plashe ish gettin' a good write-up in the Guide, lemme tell ya."

He fumbled around in his noisome bag, eventually withdrawing a compact, battered object with the words 'DON'T PANIC' written on the casing in big, friendly letters. Leeron was about to ask what it was, when the man's truly monumental alcohol consumption finally caught up with him. He tottered over sideways, falling to the floor with an impressive crash. His head landed on the scientist's foot, and was pushed away with a dainty kick.

Leeron examined his own glass, and found it disappointingly empty. He withdrew another couple of coins from his wallet, and flipped them onto the bar.

"Bartender, another of those divine mint juleps, if you would?"

"Certainly, sir."

The man hadn't asked where his near-infinite supply of money came from, which was probably for the best. Leeron rather doubted that anyone back home would look very kindly on him abusing Spiral Energy to pay for cocktails. For some reason, the prospect of the universe imploding was something they got very uptight about. He took an experimental sip of the proffered drink. As expected, it was worth it.

"So, what unit're you with?" the bartender asked conversationally.

"Unit?"

"Sorry, I just assumed you were part of one of the military departments. This is a soldiers' bar, you see, and you've got the look about you."

The lanky androgyne pondered this. _Either he's unusually perceptive, or they have a very unconventional approach to warfare. Whatever the case, I think I'll fit in here just fine._

"Oh, no, I've only just arrived. I _am_ supposed to be linking up with the First Expeditionary Force at some point, though, and I must say, I'm actually looking forward to it quite a bit. All those handsome young military-types in their tight, tight uniforms..." He trailed off dreamily.

"The First Expeditionary Force? You mean Hayate's Lesbian Army?" a patron called out from another table. "Yeah, don't think you're going to have much luck there, mate."

The others sitting next to him sniggered.

Leeron raised an elegant eyebrow. "Oh?"

"It's mostly female combat mages," the first speaker's equally large and hairy companion explained. "You know how they are – don't spend so much time diving for cover as they do diving for-"

"Chain Whip!"

A ribbon of pale green light slashed into the table, shattering it and sending its occupants flying backwards. The caster, a bespectacled young man with long blond hair drawn back in a ponytail, wiped his hand on his trouser leg disdainfully.

"I hate that nickname," he announced to the room in general.

The bartender winced. "Come on, Yuuno, that's the third time this month. Grow a thicker skin, will you?"

"Oh, just take the repair expenses out of my account, Lagonda," the new arrival said casually. "You know I'm good for it."

"Yes, but-"

"All right, fine, it won't happen again. Probably." He turned to Leeron, who was watching the proceedings with mild curiosity. "As for you, you're coming with me. By the way, feel free to crack any off-colour jokes about my friends you've got stored up – I've been doing some research into offensive applications for shielding spells lately, and I'd just _love_ to have a live test subject."

The Spiral grinned. "Wouldn't dream of it, sweetie. I assume you're my liaison with the First?"

"In a manner of speaking. I'm Yuuno Scrya, head of the Infinite Library. We'll be working together on that little transport problem Operation Guardian's been having lately. Sorry about the unfortunate first impression – I'm not usually like that. Those idiots just hit a nerve, is all."

In their struggle to escape the tangle of broken furniture they had found themselves in, one of Yuuno's victims accidentally elbowed another patron in the face. This had led to a full scale bar brawl, whilst the poor bartender could only watch and wave around his Armed Device in a vaguely alarming manner. Even the semiconscious travel writer had joined in, employing what appeared to be a weighted towel with devastating effect.

"So I see," Leeron commented. "Shall we depart? I _really_ didn't like the look the owner threw at you just then."

"You're probably right," Yuuno agreed. "He'll get over it eventually – he always does – but I probably shouldn't be seen around here for a few days. In the meantime, I'll see you to your quarters. We'll discuss our objectives in a few hours' time – I assume you've already been briefed, but here's our take on the situation anyway."

He passed Leeron a datapad. On examining it, the Spiral saw that it was of the electronic variety, usable by a non-magic-user such as himself. _Very considerate of them._

"So, what will you be doing once I've been dropped off, sweetie?"

"Heading back to the Library and making sure it hasn't burned down in my absence. I swear, it's like herding cats. Well, catgirls, anyway."

"Ah, I see."

They walked off in silence, Leeron discreetly checking out his escort's toned behind in the process. _Maybe working with the First won't be so bad after all..._

* * *

Though Colonel Yagami and the combat mages certainly had plenty to occupy them, life for the rest of the _Eventide_'s crew was fairly uneventful. Most of their time was spent filling out paperwork, keeping the ship maintained, and meeting friends and family back on Mid-Childa. In particular, Fred Jones had spent the past couple of days engaged in the last of these three.

It had been simply idyllic – his daughter was back from school, and his wife had managed to schedule a completely free weekend. On the first day, they'd gone to one of the new amusement parks, a product of the currently-fashionable Mid-Childan preoccupation with Earth culture. Though it lacked much of the low-tech charm of the genuine articles his own parents had taken him to when he was a child, the park had certainly compensated for it with a plethora of technosorcerous bells and whistles. Little Georgia (she wasn't so little any more, but that was how he'd always thought of her) had been utterly enamoured, dragging them from ride to show to ride until Fred thought that his joints were about to give in.

The second day had been more sedate. They had stayed at home, playing games with each other and sharing stories of their time apart. Fred had flashed up a few of the images he had captured during the _Eventide_'s expedition – the scarred face of Bloodhaven, alien ships trading shots between the stars, the gleaming Spiral capital... wonders and terrors of such magnitude that they seemed almost absurd in their cosy, slightly untidy little home. In the evening, he and his wife had left Georgia with the neighbours, heading out to a small restaurant they saved for special occasions. Once they had finished, they returned to the house, he put on some music, and they danced together for the first time in ages. He wasn't nearly as spry as he had been, and the extra pounds he'd put on in the intervening years didn't help much either, but somehow that hadn't seemed to matter. They'd gone to bed afterwards, and he'd been pleased to discover that a certain old nightgown still fitted her _very_ nicely.

Now, though, he was back at the office, and wishing it felt more like a commute than an extended stay. He doubted the current situation would allow that, though – they'd already been assigned a new mission, and the preparations for launch had begun almost immediately.

He knocked on the door to Gunther's quarters.

"Enter."

It slid open, revealing an immaculate, spartanly-decorated room beyond. Gunther was working at his desk, neat stacks of order forms and cargo authorisation requests on either side.

"Problem?" he asked.

"Good guess, boss. There's been a mix-up in catering – wrong supplies got sent down. They wanted you to have a look at it."

"Staff there can't resolve?"

"'Fraid not – the stuff they got was meant for an entirely different department. Bit outside their jurisdiction."

"Show me."

"You got it, boss."

Gunther got up, grabbing his uniform jacket from where it was folded over the back of the chair. As he did so, Fred took the opportunity to further examine the room. His earlier opinion of 'sparsely-decorated' turned out to be something of an understatement; apart from the desk, which had been heavily customised with lots of little ergonomic drawers and stationery-holders, the room was completely devoid of anything that might indicate habitation. No mementos, no personal effects, no nothing. This was a room for sleeping and working in, nothing more. Fred was not in the habit of rifling through the wardrobes of senior officers and old friends, but he suspected that if he had, he would have found the clothes within as tidily folded as if they were still on the shelves they had been bought from.

Not for the first time, he wondered if Gunther _had_ any friends apart from him. If he did, Fred had never met them.

They headed out into the central office's endless corridors, Fred falling into step beside and slightly behind Gunther as always. A tall, willowy woman passed them by, holding a stack of datapads. Fred gave her a wave, and she waved back, somehow managing not to drop any of the pads in the process.

Gunther shot him a quizzical glance.

"That's Stella Kei," he explained. "One of our junior accountants. Doesn't look like her new diet's been paying off too well – at least she seems to be over the divorce, though."

"Divorce?"

"Yeah, a real messy one – her husband took just about everything." He sighed. "We did warn her that the bastard was a conniving thug. Whole department had a whip-round, got her a nice little hamper full of goodies as commiseration. Anyway, glad to see her looking remotely cheerful again."

The glance had turned into a full-on bemused stare. "You know _everyone_?"

"I try, boss."

Soon, they were on the walkway to the _Eventide_ once more. Looking down, Fred saw that the bustling of the ground crew was a bit more precise and organised than last time. Clearly, Gunther had been working his usual magic.

Signum walked past, nodding to her fellow captain.

"Quartermaster."

"Ma'am."

Fred couldn't help but notice the wistful glance his friend directed at the knight's retreating form.

"Think she's a bit out of your league, boss."

A faint grin. "Man can dream."

By the time they arrived at the galley, it was already busy. Several of the more prescient crewmembers hadn't even bothered moving out of their quarters on the ship once they got back, and there was usually quite a large queue at mealtimes. Fred noticed a new addition to the catering staff – the time-traveller girl, Mikuru Asahina, who had taken to serving food like the proverbial duck to water. At the moment, she was ladling potatoes onto the plates of two serious-looking thirteen-year-olds in the uniforms of combat mages who he recognised as Erio Mondial and Caro La Rushe, Captain Testarossa-Harlaown's adoptive children.

The other two representatives they had retrieved on their first visit to the informally-titled 'Suzumiyaverse' had gone on to rather more exalted positions. Emiri Kimidori had been attached to High Command along with her fellow Humanoid Interfaces, whilst Itsuki Koizumi had been busy helping out the refugees they'd pulled out in the few days before that universe's Earth had gone _completely_ to hell.

That had been a bad business – Fred had heard the stories from those who had taken part in the mission. Running silent through a dimensional storm, hoping against hope that the fragile wards they had been given would shield them from the eyes of an enslaved god, had only been the first part. Once they had hit the ground, they had been forced to fight off seemingly endless waves of monsters, daemons, and insane once-humans whilst evacuating crowd upon crowd of soldiers and civilians, many of them mutated, badly injured, or both. Even the terrain itself had assaulted them, trees walking, buildings crushing them with stony fists, and the ground opening up beneath them to swallow them whole. In the end, they had lost four ships and over three hundred combat mages (including several above AA-rank), all to save fifteen thousand people. Fifteen thousand out of six _billion_. To top it off, the Interface who had organised it all, Yuki Nagato, had turned out to be acting against orders and was effectively sentenced to life imprisonment for her actions, which was generally considered a _mild_ punishment by her compatriots.

All in all, it was no wonder that High Command didn't fully trust the Integrated Data Entity and its representatives any more.

He'd talked to some of the refugees, too, when Gunther had been sent down to help with housing and supplies. Seeing as the First had been so haphazardly pulled together from all over the Bureau, nobody higher-up felt too much guilt about borrowing some of them from time to time for outside work. It had been... strange. Most of them were specialists; time-travellers, espers, and the like. The sort of people who had been reasonably clued-in about the peculiarities of the local cosmology before the Fall. That was probably why they'd managed to survive so long, in fact. As such, they knew that there were still powers out there that could reverse this, make it all better. The Integrated Data Entity, for instance, which was presumably the reason for its refusal to back the evacuation. Even as they'd told him this, though, Fred had seen the doubt, the dread in their eyes. _What if Chaos gets to them first? What if they aren't as good as we think they are? What if everything comes back... _wrong_, somehow?_ Living with gods and god-like beings looming over your head all the time had its advantages and its disadvantages.

The other refugees, the ones from the Federation's universe, were rather different. They had no gods, no magical reset button in the sky. Their problems would only be resolved by a long, gruelling recovery process (if at all), and they knew it. Understandably, tensions had been a little high between the two fledgling communities. Fred was very, very glad that dealing with it wasn't his job.

He heard curt orders coming from the rear of the galley – clearly, Gunther had gone into action. He wandered over to see how things were doing, and saw a couple of kitchen staff scurrying off, presumably on some mission or another. The quartermaster was standing alone, regarding their fleeing backs with amused satisfaction.

"Problem solved, boss?"

"For the moment."

Given that Gunther had not moved on to something else, Fred mentally translated this as 'there'll be another one in a minute'. Sure enough, one of the cooks hurried in a second later.

"Second shelf, by walnuts," he was informed before he had time to open his mouth.

The cook saluted. "Much obliged, sir."

After a moment's consideration, Gunther turned to Fred.

"Mission details?"

"You mean the one we're going on next?" he asked, slightly thrown by the change of subject. "Why would I have those?"

"Always do."

"OK, fair point. They're pretty highly-classified, though, so I wasn't able to catch everything. What I _do_ know is that it's a tech-retrieval job. We're headed to a Non-Administered World in Bureau space, another alternate Earth, to pick up some gizmo called a Lambda Driver. No idea what that is, but it's clearly something important. Omega-level clearance, boss."

Gunther gave a low whistle. "Impressive."

"Too right." _At least it can't help but be better than our maiden voyage. Hope it doesn't take too long, though. I want to get back to my family as soon as possible._

Another thought occurred to him as they wandered off. _What was Stella doing with all those datapads? We have assistants for that sort of thing. Maybe I'll ask later._

By the time the day was over, though, he'd forgotten all about it.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** What, you seriously thought something like the Infinite Library _wouldn't_ be conected to L-space?

Yeah, the destruction of the Praxis raised my eyebrows a little - I mean, given that a far more orderly destabilisation took an entire trilogy of not-inconsiderably-sized books to resolve, what sort of hell do you think the _Stiletto_'s intervention unleashed? Oh, and drawing parallels to real-life events? Moi? Surely you jest.

'Hayate's Lesbian Army', for the record, is an actual fan nickname for Section Six, not something I made up myself. Really, after watching StrikerS, can you blame 'em?

On an unrelated topic, I wonder if they do Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters on Mid-Childa?


	16. Organising the Party

**15. Organising the Party**

The forces of Chaos had been busy since the battle for Bloodhaven. Though the Ori had not returned, presumably believing their mission fulfilled, work on the base around the Stargate had continued apace, turning it into a capacious staging ground and nigh-impregnable fortress. Kilometre-long, gargoyle-encrusted ships hung in the air in contemptuous defiance of gravity, while huge lance-thrower turrets tracked the slightest movement above. A network of trenches and low fortifications extended out from the main encampment, hulking artillery pieces gazing over them with eyes both electronic and organic.

Primarch Toji Suzuhara couldn't help wondering if the gods knew something he didn't. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

At present, he was busy surveying the construction work on the northern defence lines with one half of his brain and calculating the forces under his command with the other. For a Primarch, his flesh reshaped by the gods themselves, this was not nearly as hard as it sounded.

_Let's see now... two battle companies from each of the Chapters except Kensuke's boys, two infantry regiments, five armoured companies, three thousand gun-servitors, six thousand plague zombies, and the-gods-alone-know-how-many daemons. Have I missed anyone? Ah yes..._

The scarred, rocky earth shook as five gaunt, armoured giants strode into view, their myriad weapons tracking to and fro. The encampment had been given ten Evangelions in total – two of the standard Mark Vs, and eight of the new Mark VIs. The latter lacked some of the sophistication and raw firepower of the earlier designs, thanks largely to trained human pilots being replaced with daemonic possessors in an attempt to combat personnel shortages, but they made up for it by both being easier to mass-produce and having several interesting new tricks thanks to their greater connection to the Warp. Besides, they were still Evangelions, and thus pretty much invincible in Toji's professional opinion.

Then there were the Space Marines. Taken at a young age, subjected into training unmatched in brutality until the launch of the Divine Assassin Program, implanted with augmentations both biological and cybernetic until they were second only in might to the Primarchs themselves, and brainwashed into exemplars of discipline, loyalty, and precisely-applied brutality, they were about as close to the perfect soldiers as it was possible to get. The facts that they wore armour of a durability usually reserved for main battle tanks and that their basic infantry weapon was essentially a compact, fully-automatic rocket launcher were merely the icing on the cake.

The remainder of his forces were less overtly imposing, but still fairly impressive. Much of their equipment had been adapted from the gods' received memories of the 41st millennium, and applied with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Those human infantry not specifically assigned to a heavy weapons team or some other specialist role were equipped with gleaming black carapace armour and hellguns, whilst the clone-bred servitors compensated for their lack of intellect with thick armour, extensive bionics, and a terrifying array of oversized weaponry. When coupled with the tanks, daemons, and zombies, the garrison represented truly ridiculous overkill even by the gods' relaxed standards.

_So who'd they manage to piss off _this _time?_ he thought.

Though even someone of his stature tended to get left out of the loop on occasion – Tzintchi in particular loved nothing better than yanking his subordinates' chains – the current climate of silence was both unusual and worrying. That kind of information lockdown usually meant that something he really wouldn't like was about to happen.

He wondered what had happened to that girl they'd captured, Vita. The gods hadn't given him an answer there, either. A small, treacherous part of him hoped that it had not been the same thing that happened to the _other_ young female mage they had got their hands on.

Rescuing Alicia and her mother from the Warp had been a singular act of mercy. The gods themselves personally raising her? An unquestioned honour. He just wished the end result had been a little less... well... _psychotic_.

He knew she looked up to him; saw him as some sort of big-brother figure. Hikari teased him about it mercilessly, alluding in a faux-dramatic voice to his 'secret admirer'. It was just... how exactly were you supposed to explain to a cheerful, sweet-natured twelve-year-old that casual homicide wasn't a healthy, constructive hobby to have, especially when it was part of both your and her job descriptions? More to the point, would the gods even _want_ him to?

As if on cue, Alicia swooped in and landed next to him, executing a flawless salute. "Toji, they've finished work on the western barricades. Just thought you should know."

She was beaming happily, her cheeks slightly flushed. At times like this, it was almost possible to think of her as an ordinary child. Instinctively, Toji gave her a gentle pat on the head with his armoured gauntlet, almost driving her to her knees in the process.

"Good to hear it, Ali. How's your little project with the Stargate going, by the way?"

"Pretty well – just found out that you can transmit psychic signals through them. Papa Tzintchi was _very_ interested in that." She scraped something red and sticky off her gloves. "You know, I really wish we didn't have to sacrifice so many clones to do it. I mean, it's fun for a while, but it always leaves such a mess afterwards."

_Yep. _Almost _possible._

She glared at him reproachfully. "Anyway, didn't I tell you to quit with the head-patting? I'm not a little kid any more, you know."

"Right. I was forgetting. Incidentally, they're running a fleet exercise up in orbit this afternoon, and I've been asked to oversee it. Want to come look? I'm sure a lovely lady like yourself would enliven an otherwise dull procedure."

A frustrated pout. "I can't – they're going to be running some more of those stupid tests on me. Seeing what I can do. You'd have thought they'd figured out most of that already."

He gave a sympathetic sigh. "Ah well, can't be helped. These things happen. Tell you what – I'll take a few snapshots with the helmet-cam while I'm up there. I'm sure Captain Tung would be happy to donate that model of the _Stiletto_ she's got on her desk to a good cause, too."

She hugged his leg – it was about as high as she could reach, really. "Thanks, Toji! Well, I suppose I'd best get going, then. See ya!"

He started to wave as she skipped away, only to see her stop next to a passing servitor, rip its heart out in a spray of gore, and gulp it down on the spot.

Toji had always wondered if the clones had souls. Now he knew. That revelation, though, was secondary to something else, something he now desperately tried to blot out as only a Primarch could.

As Alicia had devoured the dripping organ, he had heard her mother's disembodied voice scream out in horror and grief.

* * *

The Hellhounds were lined up in perfect ranks, their matte-black bodysuits seeming to absorb the light around them. Not one of them spoke, and even visible breathing had been eliminated by their bionic respiratory systems. The only indication that they were alive at all was the way their heads had swivelled to look at Tzintchi as he entered the chamber, their expressions hidden behind their scorpion-like helmets.

He'd been having a bad day. They'd had to exert more and more power to support the war effort, slowing time to a crawl where required to ensure the prompt completion of important projects, and investing warp-energy in the mass-production of clones as servants, soldiers, and occasionally sacrifices. Though both had been undoubtedly useful – the Divine Assassin project had managed to compress four years of training into a single _month_, and the clones had gone a long way to helping with their critical manpower shortage – they had considerable limitations and active disadvantages.

For a start, there were the clone instability issues. The more sophisticated the intellect they created for any given clone, the more violent, irrational, and generally sociopathic they became. The shining example was the posthuman Kyon Junior, who was an active liability (if still too much trouble to warrant replacing). Reigle had posited that this was for much the same reason as the increased negative effects whenever they made greater use of their powers, but whatever the case, it had effectively stymied their plans to repopulate the Earth using warp-born clones. Even introducing them to state-sponsored breeding projects had been a failure – clone-created sperm resulted in unacceptable rates of mutation and birth defects, whilst their attempts to artificially inseminate cloned females... didn't really bear thinking about.

The time-distortion had been even worse, creating the sort of tangles in the space-time continuum that would have given Albert Einstein a migraine. People, objects, and even places had occasionally vanished, falling into the gaps, and when coupled with the weird side-effects that resulted from any major use of the gods' powers, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the Earth _habitable_, let alone the happily anarchic utopia they had once intended it as.

The most subtle and troubling effects, though, had been on the gods' own personalities. Asukhon, never the calmest of individuals, had become increasingly snappish and irritable, whilst Reigle grew more and more withdrawn, eternally preoccupied with her bizarre 'experiments' and answering his requests with the sort of robotic obedience that reminded Tzintchi unpleasantly of her time as his father's puppet.

And then there was Mislaato. She'd always been the most fragile of them – such was to be expected when one was mind-raped over several months by a greater daemon of the Old Gods, killed messily, and finally resurrected by the power of the Warp. Consequently, she had been affected the most, to the point where a significant part of the cloning project was now devoted to slaking her ever-increasing appetites.

Nevertheless, Tzintchi was largely unconcerned. They were the Old Gods' chosen weapons, not the Old Gods themselves. They need not share their weaknesses – and even if they did, the current situation was only temporary. Once they had defeated those who dared to oppose them, they could go back to their saner, more measured approach to pan-dimensional conquest.

In the meantime, though, they had the Hellhounds.

"I think you'll be pleased with the results, my lord," Fleshcrafter Allard said confidently. "The cybernetics make them considerably stronger and faster than an ordinary human, not to mention a whole lot quieter. The armour on their bodysuits can shrug off a direct hit from a bolt round without crippling damage, and we even managed to replicate the splinter pistol design you gave us. I must say, those Commoragh Eldar you spoke of had some really nifty equipment."

He handed the god a sheaf of documents, which he duly flicked through. Tzintchi was wearing his human guise for this visit – personal inspections always added that much-appreciated impression that your bosses cared what you were doing, but Allard and his staff were accredited geniuses, so searing out their minds by revealing his true form probably wouldn't be the best of plans.

"The really important bit, though," the scientist continued, "is how we set up their minds. They aren't as sophisticated as a fully-developed human – we're not stupid – but they're smart, they're resourceful, and they're vicious. Hunter-killer, infiltrator... they can do it all. Might not want to let them near civilians, though – once their blood's up, they can get a bit... indiscriminate. Finally, we took a look at the readings you sent us on those two mages you picked up, and we taught them a few tricks in that department."

"Really? Interesting."

Tzintchi raised his hand, and sent a gout of indigo fire washing across the assembled ranks. As one, the Hellhounds moved to respond, and two hundred reddish-purple shields appeared from their outstretched fingers, staving off the assault.

"_Very_ interesting. How about melee weaponry? Anything there?"

"Naturally, my lord. We assumed that that would be the range at which most combat would occur, and concentrated much of our attention upon it. Each Hound has a pair of Angel Cutter phase blades, the kind the Callidus-pattern Divine Assassins employ, built into them. One in each retractable forearm-sheath. I spent ages getting the 'snikt' sound when they pop out _just_ right."

Allard was a comic fan, the god remembered. There was something about building an army of killer cyborgs that couldn't help but bring out your inner teenager. Even their name had been a topic of minor debate – Asukhon had wanted to save it for the flamethrower-tanks it had originally applied to until he had gently reminded her that tanks still required human personnel, and sending valuable troops into battle riding a giant, self-propelled napalm bomb would likely not be beneficial to their current manpower problem.

"So how many do we have now?" he asked.

"Over two thousand, with plenty more to come. That's the great thing about cloned soldiers – they're so easy to mass-produce. Matter of fact, some of their equipment, especially the Angel Cutters, is taking longer to make than the bodies we're fitting it on. We should be able to get the full consignment done on schedule without any more time-distortion than we've already got."

"Excellent." Tzintchi turned to the rest of the assembled staff. "Ladies and gentlemen, you have pleased your gods greatly. I'll go chat to Mislaato and see if she can rustle up some kind of suitable reward for you. And no, that wasn't intended to come out as sinister as it did – I'm just naturally like that."

That got a few nervous laughs. He turned around, his jacket flaring out dramatically, and vanished in a cloud of multicoloured lights.

"And now," his disembodied voice said with a little extra reverb for added effect, "I bid you adieu."

Showing off in front of one's followers was always such _fun_.

* * *

When he rematerialised, it was back in the Eye. Mislaato wasn't there, unfortunately, but Reigle and Asukhon were. They'd clearly been having an argument – much of the ever-shifting furniture lay broken and shattered on the temporary floor, and the former's decaying flesh bore several rapidly-reknitting wounds. Tzintchi decided it would be impolitic to bring this up, though, especially since there'd apparently been no lasting damage.

"So, my dears, it appears the Hellhounds are almost ready, and you know what this means."

"Planning session?" Reigle asked flatly.

"Yep. Planning session. Now, to the best of my knowledge, we have no less than five universes opposing us. The first, that of the Federation, Borg, and associates, is no real threat. The _Stiletto_ broke their backs quite comprehensively – in fact, the Bureau's overtures are likely to do little more than exacerbate an already-chaotic situation. Equally, Haruhi's little prison has been effectively neutered by K.J.'s depredations. The Integrated Data Entity still represents a potential spanner in the works, but it's mostly a known threat, and an exploitable one at that. It's always nice to know where the opposition's getting most of their intel from."

A wave of his hand, and three large dimensional maps appeared in the centre of the room.

"The other three, though, are a bit more... problematic. The TSAB are relatively low-tech compared to the others, but their magic means they can punch _way_ above their weight, and the fact that they're organising the whole thing instantly elevates their dangerousness. As for the Spirals, I'd hoped to avoid them for decades to come. At present they're a relatively peaceful bunch with gadgetry they barely understand, but their potential is utterly _terrifying_, and if the reports are correct then they've managed to live up to it in the past. Worse, both sides are ideologically opposed to us to such an extent that employing peaceful overtures as a delaying tactic likely wouldn't work. We're going to have to hit them, and hit them _hard_."

"I am developing a countermeasure against the Spirals," Reigle stated, "though it may take some time to perfect. Meanwhile, however, I have a suggestion regarding the final universe, that of the New Republic."

"Go on," Tzintchi said encouragingly_. Good old Rei – nice to see that her brain-cells haven't rotted as well._

"You mentioned that diplomatic channels would be ineffective in dealing with the Time-Space Administrative Bureau and Spiral Nation, but the New Republic is run by an overstretched, inefficient, and highly factionalised government with a history of internal strife."

"A typical democracy, basically," Asukhon commented. The gods tended to harbour a fairly dim view of rule by committee. Given that a particularly well-organised one had almost turned the planet's entire population into semi-sentient orange juice eighteen years before, this was perhaps understandable.

The goddess of despair acknowledged this with a faint smile, their earlier dispute apparently forgotten. "Furthermore, the one faction who would most likely be opposed to us on an ideological basis, the Jedi, have faced frequent criticism and occasionally been overruled entirely. Given that our activities in that universe have given its residents little reason to harbour a personal grudge, approaching them and casting ourselves in a sympathetic light has a high probability of preventing them from acting against us until it is far too late."

"Fair point, Rei. I think we can go with that. Anything you'd like to add, Asuka?"

She gave one of her trademark many-toothed grins. "Indeed there is. In fact, I'd like to replace that suggestion with one of my own. It's a nice idea, Rei, but it's far too conservative as always. With my plan we can _destroy_ the Republic rather than temporarily distracting it, plunge their entire galaxy into a state of exploitable chaos, and, best of all, avoid having to suck up to a bunch of self-centred, self-righteous politicians."

Tzintchi raised three of his eyebrows. "And how, my dear, do you intend that we do that?"

The grin widened to a quite impossible extent, and she indicated a cluster of symbols some way outside the Republic's galaxy. "Simple. We use _these_ guys."

* * *

Supreme Commander Varak Shaar was in something of an awkward situation. This displeased him. Awkward situations were something he liked to inflict on _other_ people. There was no avoiding this one, though – he was clearly the only one on the ship even remotely approaching the appropriate rank to deal with it.

On the one hand, he was naturally disinclined to trust axe-wielding aliens who materialised on the bridge of his prized vessel without so much as a by-your-leave, particularly when they were quite obviously unintimidated by the magnificence of the mighty Miid Ro'ik battlecruiser. In fact, this particular one had asked him for interior decoration tips.

On the other, she (it was hard to tell with aliens, but she had introduced herself as such) offered a truly unrivalled opportunity to him and the entire Chosen Race. Specifically, the chance to assault their target galaxy six years ahead of schedule with outside assistance, no strings attached.

"And what," he asked, "do you get out of this, infidel?"

Given that she apparently used technology no more sophisticated than primitive bronze armour and the aforementioned axe, whether or not she was an infidel was pure guesswork. He felt confident in his assumption, though – nobody who looked like that could _possibly_ be holy.

"The elimination of a potential threat," she replied. "One of their civilisations, the New Republic, has been contacted by an alliance opposed to us. We would prefer that said alliance does not gain their strength. This galaxy is irrelevant so long as its inhabitants do not present a threat to us, and I intend no insult to the Chosen Race when I say that you do not."

_Cocky little _tsup_, isn't she?_ He decided not to make an issue of the fact that she could speak their language so perfectly.

"And why is that?"

"Because I very much doubt that our enemies would get along as well with you as with them."

Shaar grunted. "Very well. I shall inform the Warmaster of your proposition. Remain where you are, infidel, until my return. If you do not, I shall devour your heart and wear your wings as a cape."

She made a strange snorting noise that he eventually recognised as indicating amusement. "Supreme Commander, I believe I am starting to like you."

Three days, fifteen honour-duels, and just under a hundred deaths later, the endless fleet of the Yuuzhan Vong changed course. By their standards it had been a fairly smooth transition, though the new Warmaster's freshly-appointed second-in-command was a bit disappointed at missing out on the nice new cape he'd been looking forward to.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** For the record, Varak Shaar was _really_ fun to write. You can always rely on Chaos to screw things up for everyone else, eh?

Expect to see quite a bit more Dark Eldar tech this time round than in the original. This is not because it's inherently more 'evil', but because the lovely folks from Commoragh are opportunistic scavengers who compensate for their technological deficiencies (they can't even create their own wraithbone) with the generous application of Warp-based weirdness. I figured, therefore, that their stuff would be much easier to replicate when you're starting with a twenty-first-century tech base as newChaos is. Divine knowledge can only help so much. OK, so I suppose the Warp's influence _does_ make it that much more evil as well, but that's beside the point.

Oh yes, and Toji and Alicia are indeed going to be playing a significant part later on. Remember I said Bloodhaven would be useful? Yep. For the record, I only noticed the disturbingly symbolic imagery of the heart-devouring scene just after I'd written it. I stared at it for a moment... and then decided to keep it. Yes, I am one sick puppy.

See you next week!


	17. Transport Arrangements

**16. Transport Arrangements**

Yuuno was not having a fun voyage. It had mostly been comprised of half a week's worth of running calculations and compiling data – slightly dull, but the sort of thing a scholar and researcher like himself was generally used to. What he was _not_ used to was the presence of his co-worker. Leeron was a genius, no doubt about that, compensating for his relative lack of knowledge by being a near-inhumanly quick study, but his conduct... well, pretty much the only reason Yuuno hadn't yet reported him for sexual harassment was that then someone might then start looking for the body when the old lecher finally pushed his luck a bit too far.

At present, he was hauling a metre-long sheaf of blueprints through the _Eventide_'s crew quarters. Normally, he would have floated the things over to his study remotely, but on a cramped, crowded military vessel, that tended to have unfortunate and amusing consequences. Things had come to a head when they had hit a dimensional storm halfway through the trip, causing several inanimate objects to spontaneously develop sentience. He had _eventually_ managed to persuade Signum that Jechter's 'Principles of Magical Propulsion' had nothing but gentlemanly intentions towards her, but not before the book in question was a shredded mess strewn across an entire corridor.

Ever since, he had been forced to transport the assorted files, documents, texts, and datapads by hand. If nothing else, it was providing him with some much-needed exercise.

He stopped at a junction, allowing a crowd of personnel to move past. Fate and Nanoha approached from opposite ends of the corridor, acknowledging each other with a faint nod as they passed. _Still haven't resolved it yet, eh?_

Shaking his head, he ducked into the study. Leeron was there already, reapplying his eyeshadow with the aid of a bright purple hand-mirror. As Yuuno entered, the Spiral glanced up, a look of faint concern on his piscine face.

"Oh, hello, sweetie. I must say, you look a bit down in the dumps today. Did something happen?"

"Apart from seeing the happy smiling face of my favourite creepy old man?" Yuuno asked sourly. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Oh, come now, dear boy, you and I both know it's more than that. Can't I be legitimately worried about your wellbeing? It's romance, isn't it? I've never seen that expression on anyone untouched by affairs of the heart. Come now, you can tell Uncle Leeron – a problem shared is a problem halved, after all."

Yuuno stared at him suspiciously. "You're just going to use this to try to get into my pants, aren't you?"

"My word, do you really think so little of me? Sweetie, I am no base seducer, but merely an old romantic. I would not dream of taking advantage of a pure, innocent soul such as yourself – unless you asked me to, of course." He grinned wickedly. "Incidentally, is that a new aftershave? It really suits you."

The librarian sighed and pinched his temples. "All right, but if one word of this ventures outside this room then... you know the rest."

"Yes, yes, combat magic test subject. What exactly _were_ those offensive applications for shielding spells, by the way?"

"Not relevant. Anyway, there's this girl."

"I knew it."

"She's smart, beautiful, and a generally wonderful person. I knew her since we were both kids, and well... pretty much loved her from the start. Problem is, she's already in a relationship. Married, in fact."

"Ah."

"To another woman."

"_Ah_."

"And... it's pretty much the best thing that ever happened to her. To either of them. They're the perfect couple, they've got a lovely little adopted family, and they're deliriously happy together. Most of the time, anyway. It's just that... yeah."

"Most of the time?"

"They've been having a rough patch lately. A mission went bad, _really_ bad, and her partner's family got involved. It's complicated. Anyway, they'll make up eventually, I'm sure, but in the meantime, things are kind of... strained."

"And have you considered... exploiting the situation for your own ends?" Leeron asked in a low voice, his face unreadable.

"_Just what the hell kind of scum do you think I am_?" Yuuno snarled.

"And for _that_ answer, sweetie, you get to keep your kidneys. I apologise, but I had to ask. I've seen a few of these situations in my time – you would not _believe_ the kind of emotional hothouse a research facility can turn into when you're working with Spiral Engines. Sometimes, it got very, very messy." His expression was pained – he was clearly reliving an unpleasant memory.

"Fair enough, I suppose," the librarian replied, subsiding a little. "No. No, I haven't. Like I said, it's the best thing that ever happened to her. I wouldn't want to ruin it for the world, or, for that matter, the friendship I've already got – in fact, I'm mostly pretty happy with the situation. It sometimes just gets a little bit too much, though, that's all."

Leeron gazed at him sympathetically. "I quite understand. Unrequited love is never fun – believe me, I know. Just remember, if you ever need a shoulder to cry on, I'm right here."

Yuuno grinned. "Not that I'd take you up on it in a million years, but... thanks for the offer, Leeron. Now, speaking of Spiral Engine side-effects, I believe that was what we were going to be covering today. Shall we begin?"

"Let's."

* * *

Two days later, they were in orbit above the parallel Earth.

The _Eventide_'s briefing room was rather quieter this time around, containing Hayate, Nanoha, Fate, Leeron, Yuuno, the Wolkenritter, and nobody else except a couple of the more reliable technicians.

"So why the secrecy?" Nanoha asked.

"Well, everyone knows by now that this mission is for tech-retrieval, yes?" Hayate asked.

They all nodded.

"The thing is, the technology in question is vital to the entire war-effort, and we know from the Suzumiyaverse reports that the forces of Chaos are very fond of infiltrating the ranks of potential threats. Given that we still don't know _what_ was up with those scouts they sent in a couple of weeks back, I would say it pays not to advertise."

The 'war effort'. It was funny how quickly they had stopped calling it an 'intervention'. The Suzumiyaverse evacuation, the refugees from the Federation, and the reports from the universes of the Praxis and the Stargates had probably had something to do with that. There was nothing like casually triggering genocidal slaughter wherever you went to turn an uppity wannabe empire into a serious threat.

The combat instructor nodded. "That's reasonable. So what exactly is this tech?"

"Well, let me put it this way," Yuuno began. "At present, only two factions in our putative alliance have access to interdimensional travel – us, and the Spiral Nation. Unfortunately, most of our more sophisticated technology depends a bit too much on the operator's magical talents to be very useful to anyone else. Put simply, we can use their gear, but they can't use ours without a quite impractical amount of training."

"Which leaves the Spirals," Fate surmised.

"Precisely," Leeron acknowledged. "Now, Spiral Engines have considerable potential as both weapons and general tools – they are effectively powered by the user's courage, determination, and will to win against the odds, and the results can be truly spectacular. Though I doubt that anyone today – including myself – could or would replicate it, during the final battle of the War of Liberation, we used several Lagann-pattern Spiral Engines to create a warrior construct that dwarfed _galaxies_."

He noted the assembled mages' expressions.

"Oh come now, I'm on a ship powered by magic discussing devices that are driven by sheer mule-headed willpower, and _this_ is where your suspension of disbelief ends?"

"Speaking as one who has seen a _planet_ feign its own death, I would like to state that the existence of absurdity does not mandate the existence of further absurdity," Zafira commented drily. "Regardless, you mentioned that nobody _would_ replicate this feat, implying some disadvantage. Could you please elaborate?"

"Certainly. The problem is that overuse of Spiral Energy has some very nasty side-effects on the space-time continuum, not least because it ignores conservation of matter. In fact, if you push things too far, you run the risk of imploding the universe. The phenomenon is called the Spiral Nemesis, and it's one of the reasons that our civilisation has not fully exploited its potential."

"And the other?" Signum asked.

Leeron spread his hands. "We simply don't understand everything about our own technology. The first _Lagann_-pattern Engine was dug out of the ground by a bunch of primitive miners, and most of our advancement in the few decades since then has been based on imitation, bodge-jobs, and guesswork. Though it is theoretically possible to turn a Spiral Engine into a reliable, mass-producible weapon and dimensional drive, the _how_ continues to elude us. Simply bolting cheap copies of the _Gurren-Lagann_ into our allies' ships seems not only inelegant, but an active invitation to disaster."

"Which is why we're on this mission," Yuuno concluded. "After learning about the Spiral Engine, I took a look through the Infinite Library. What I found was scattered, but useful. Apparently, the people on this dimension's Earth have a fairly schizophrenic tech-level, thanks largely to a group called the 'Whispered'. Most of their stuff's late twentieth-century, early twenty-first – when you compare it to our Earth, that is – but they've got some seriously exotic gear as well, hundreds of years in advance. Among the more interesting pieces of so-called 'black technology' is a device called the 'Lambda Driver', which sounds very much like a primitive version of a Spiral Engine."

"And you want to reverse-engineer it?" Fate guessed.

"Got it in one. If we can take it apart and compare it with Leeron's knowledge of Spiral tech, we may be able to get a better idea of the basic principles that the more advanced model operates on, and more importantly learn how to produce our own without simply copying everything we can of a Spiral Energy-powered mech and hoping we haven't missed out any essential components."

"So where are we going to find this thing?" Nanoha asked.

"I'll field this," Hayate said. "I gave some of the signal readings Leeron and Yuuno provided to Sensors, and they found several hits across the globe. We hacked their internal communications, and found that though most of the sites belonged to an organisation called 'Amalgam', some were under the ownership of a rival group called 'Mithril'. Seeing as the latter's been getting better press in the intelligence communities that have heard of them, we decided we'd call them first. In fact, that was the secondary purpose of this meeting. Their primary base of operations for activities involving the Lambda Driver appears to be a small island in the south Pacific. Let's see if they're in at the moment."

She indicated the technicians.

"Gentlemen, if you would?"

They made a few adjustments, and the faint hiss of an audio feed emerged from the theatre's central projector column.

"This is the Pacific Fleet Battle Group _Tuatha de Danaan_ headquarters," an uncertain-sounding voice said. "You are not authorised to use this channel. State your business, please."

"I am Colonel Hayate Yagami of the Time-Space Administration Bureau. May I talk to your superior officer?"

There was an awkward pause, accompanied by some frantically whispered discussion on the other end of the line.

"Umm... I apologise, ma'am, but we don't have that organisation on file," the unfortunate comms officer responded. "One moment, please..."

More frantic whispering, and a deeper, older voice spoke from the other end of the line. "Colonel Yagami, this is our most securely-encrypted channel. Our head of communications – who is now crouched in the bathroom gibbering, I might add – has repeatedly assured me that it is undecipherable – indeed, unreachable – by any agency in the world today. You broke in with scarcely an effort. Would you care to explain how before I have to refer any _more_ of my men to the base psychiatrist?"

"Sorry, who am I speaking to?"

"Lieutenant Commander Andrei Sergeivich Kalinin, head of the Battle Group's ground forces. The captain and her XO are otherwise occupied. Answer the question, please."

"Well... let me put it this way, commander. Do you have an Arthur C. Clarke on this planet?"

"The science-fiction author?" Kalinin sounded completely nonplussed.

"That's the one. Anyway, you remember his Third Law? 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'? We approach that from the other direction."

"Ah. Magic. I see. Goes well with the grandiose title of your organisation, I suppose. Colonel, if this is a hoax, it is in very poor taste."

"No hoax, I assure you. In fact, I would be quite willing to send down a couple of my officers to negotiate in person. Twenty minutes from now, say? On the beach?"

"Colonel, I have so many questions I barely know where to start. For one, what exactly do you mean by 'send down'?"

"From orbit. Our ship, more specifically."

"You have a _spacecraft_?"

"Would certainly explain why you've never heard of us, yes? Commander, I know for a fact that the encryption programs this channel uses are centuries in advance of most other technology on your world, and we _still_ managed to breach them with ease. Given that, is the fact that we are capable of space travel really so incredible?"

Kalinin laughed. "All right, you've convinced me. Twenty minutes from now, on the beach. If nothing else, I'm rather interested to find out what could warrant pulling such an elaborate hoax without taking the quicker and easier option of turning our entire base into smoking wreckage."

Hayate grinned. "Don't worry – you won't be disappointed."

She looked around, and saw that several of those assembled were trying very, very hard to keep their faces straight.

She sighed. "That poor man. I do hope we didn't give them _too_ much of a scare."

"So who will be the ground team?" Signum asked, all business as always.

"Fate and Nanoha. Ladies, this little spat of yours has been going on far too long. I want to be sure that my two best combat mages can still work as a team if the situation requires it."

Both women blinked in surprise. "Ma'am?"

"That is an _order_, captains."

They saluted hastily, and left for the transporters. Shamal stared after them with a concerned expression.

"Are you sure they'll be alright?"

Hayate shrugged. "They're professionals. Besides, it was high time someone did something about it – they've been creeping around each other for _weeks_. Honestly, you'd think we didn't have a trained counsellor on board this ship, the way people keep avoiding you. Wait – don't tell me, you've been offering patients your homemade snacks, haven't you?"

"I just thought it would establish a friendly atmosphere!" the Chief Medical Officer wailed.

"Right. Food poisoning generally does. Shamal, dear, you're a wonderful person, and one of the best medics in the fleet. I'd hate to have to ask Zafira to mine the galley again."

"Sorry, Hayate. It won't happen again."

"Glad to hear it. Leave the culinary experimentation to me and Catering, all right? Now, where are the readouts on that island? I want to be sure I'm not getting _another_ ground team kidnapped here..."

* * *

Sergeant-Major Melissa Mao had just had the third-most-eventful twenty minutes of her life, during which she had been hurriedly relocated from an intimate date with a few dozen cans of beer at the base's main bar to the inside of her M9's cockpit overlooking the beach. It was scant comfort to know that she wasn't the only one – Mithril was pointing enough firepower at said beach to drop the _Behemoth_, and even Captain Testarossa and the _Tuatha_'s skeleton crew had cancelled the huge submarine's post-refit shakedown exercises in order to hurry back to land. That said, dumping a bucket of cold water over Sergeant Weber to wake him up had been _very_ therapeutic.

The worst thing was, they didn't even _know_ what they were waiting for, and the rumours among the troops had been even more exotic than usual. Aliens, wizards, black-ops agencies even more secret than them and Amalgam – the tales seemed to get wilder with every minute that passed, and the massive response the higher-ups had ordered only gave them added legitimacy.

The Arm Slave's comms system crackled, and she heard the voice of one of the Intel techs. Clearly, one of their Black Technology-enhanced sensor arrays had found something.

"All units, this is TDD Ogma Central. We're picking up some weird readings all over the EM spectrum at co-ordinates 2194/8063. No idea what's causing them, but whatever it is, it's pumping out a _lot_ of power. Recommend you target that location, over."

Frantically, Melissa inputted the co-ordinates to her mech's nav-computer. _Holy shit, it's right on top of us!_

"Kurz, you got it covered?"

"Same as always, babe." Her subordinate's voice was as obscenely cheerful as ever.

"A simple 'yes, ma'am' would have sufficed," she grumbled. "Get ready – here it comes..."

A column of light emerged from the sand before them, dancing in place for a moment before collapsing into a bright flash that almost overloaded their Arm Slaves' optic sensors. When it cleared, two female figures had appeared on the beach, hovering slightly above the ground.

They were human, at least, which was a definite plus. One was blonde, the other auburn-haired. They carried gleaming metallic staves with large, glowing gems set in their heads, and wore curious outfits which seemed halfway between elaborate dresses and alien military uniforms. The blonde was dressed in black with a white mantle, the redhead in white with blue trim. Despite their curious appearance, they scanned their surroundings with the practiced efficiency of trained soldiers, and seemed largely unfazed about having a small army of infantry, helicopters, walking tanks, and _actual_ tanks pointing guns at them.

The auburn-haired one raised her staff in greeting, a mischievous smile playing across her face.

"Greetings, Earthlings. We come in peace. Take us to your leader."

All those present – including her comrade – stared at her incredulously.

"What? _What_?"

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, another week, another update. A big 'thanks' to all the betas who have helped me out thus far - you were a tremendous help.

One thing that always bemused me was how so many fanficcers refer to Nanoha as a brunette. In the anime, she's almost as red as Teana, and that's what came first after all. Most puzzling.

The universe they're visiting this time, in case you missed it, is that of Full Metal Panic, a very entertaining hybrid of high-school comedy and gritty near-future military sc-fi. Highly recommended, with one of the best dubs I've yet encountered.


	18. School Trip

**17. School Trip**

The two TSAB officers were being escorted through the Mithril base by Lieutenant Commander Kalinin and a quartet of military-types with very big guns. So far things had been going well, in that nobody had started shooting at them. Not that Nanoha could persuade Fate to adopt such a sanguine attitude, though.

_You know, Hayate said we were professionals. Her best combat mages. Remember that?_ her partner asked acidly.

_Look, I've been the Bureau poster-girl ever since I was ten. Am I not allowed a little levity in my life?_

_Was that an invitation to compare traumatic pasts? Please tell me it wasn't an invitation to compare traumatic pasts. I've got a list, Nanoha. A long list._

_OK, bad choice of words there. I'm sorry. It's just that all I did was fulfil the dreams of every Earthborn human since the golden age of Fifties B-movies._

_And people wonder why Earth's considered a primitive backwater? Honestly, Hayate's going to blow a fuse._

_Hayate? She was the one who first suggested it! Admittedly, we were both twelve at the time, but still..._

_Nanoha, sometimes I really, really have difficulty believing you're two months older than me. Let's get back to business, all right? Try not to embarrass us any further, please._

They entered a large office, presumably that of the base's commander. Sitting at the desk was a girl with silver hair who couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. Neither of these facts were particularly odd to Bureau mages, but they did seem a bit out-of-place in the relative mundanity of the Mithril base.

She looked up at them and smiled. Her hair was ruffled, and she looked just as flustered as everyone else on the base. _I really wish the TSAB would formalise a standard first-contact protocol,_ Nanoha thought. _It would save us no end of trouble._

"Ah, good afternoon. I'm Captain Tessa Testarossa, commander of the TDD-1 and, by extension, the Battle Group as a whole. I believe you wished to speak with me?"

Nanoha smiled back. "We did indeed. I'm Captain Nanoha Takamachi, and this is my partner Captain Fate Testarossa-Harlaown."

"Pleased to meet you. Another Testarossa? I wasn't aware there were that many of us around. Do you think we could be related?"

"Unless your family hails from another planet and has a history of producing mad scientists, it seems unlikely," Fate replied blandly.

Tessa giggled in a very un-captainly manner. "Well, I'm pretty sure we're all from Earth, but we certainly have the mad scientists. I dabble in a little bit of it myself, actually. Most of my family's gone by now, though – well, except for my older brother, but he's a senior member of a high-tech international terrorist organisation, so I suppose he doesn't really count."

"Oh, I've only got a sister myself. Well, sort of a sister. She fell ill when she was young, went into a coma, and our mother cloned me as a replacement. Then things got very, very complicated and unpleasant. Um."

There was a long, awkward pause.

"Ah.," said Tessa finally. "Right. Now, weren't we discussing your reason for coming here?"

Nanoha's knees almost buckled with relief. "Yes. Yes we were. It's about the Lambda Driver – we wanted to have a look at it, see how we could integrate it with existing technology. Obviously, we wouldn't be asking you to do this for free – we'd be happy to share our findings, suggest improvements for the design."

Tessa nodded. "That seems reasonable. I'll have to run it past the General Council, but I doubt they'll object too much. Can I assume you'll be sending down further personnel to help with the analysis?"

"That was the general plan, if you'll permit it. Same place?"

"I see no problem with that. Sergeant Weber, Sergeant-Major Mao, would you please go greet our second set of visitors?"

Two of the soldiers saluted and hurried off.

She leaned back in her chair. "While we're waiting, would you mind explaining more about your organisation? It's not every day I get to meet passing spacefarers."

"We'd be delighted to," Nanoha replied, offering up a silent entreaty to whoever was listening that the science team would behave themselves.

* * *

Melissa shook her head. "I really don't see what the captain thinks she's doing. We've only known about these people for about five minutes, and already she's inviting them to take a look at one of our most advanced pieces of equipment?"

They were driving back to the beach in one of the base's jeeps – they'd decided that getting back in their M9s just for a pickup would be far too fiddly and time-consuming. More accurately, Melissa was driving, whilst Kurz was attempting to salvage his expensive haircut from the ravages of the bucket of water.

The sergeant snorted. "Come on, Melissa, you really think those two looked like alien-invader material? You worry way too much about these things. Besides, the decision isn't in Tessa's hands. It'll be up to the Council to figure out whether we want to help or not, and if these Bureau ladies can talk their way past _that_ bunch of geriatric paranoids, then we _know_ they're harmless. She loses nothing by being nice to them – if the Council gives the go-ahead, then everything's fine and dandy, and if they don't, well... she tried to help, right? Not her fault that her superiors weren't so understanding."

She glanced at him in surprise, almost hitting an unfortunate PRT squaddie in the process. "That's... actually pretty intelligent, sergeant."

"Hey, babe, I'm not just a pretty face. Speaking of, did you see the pair on that blonde one? I wouldn't mind initiating first contact with _her_ over a plate of oysters."

"Hah. I knew it couldn't last."

"Look, it's our mandate as human beings to explore the unknown and open up exciting new relationships with the rest of the galaxy. Future generations will thank me."

"That, or point and laugh at the smoking crater that's your sole mortal legacy. Anyway, chit-chat's over – this is our stop."

They got out, Melissa taking point. Unfortunately, Kurz apparently hadn't got the memo about shutting up and concentrating on the mission.

"Hey, I wonder if they're all like that? An entire shipful of hot alien girls... well, that's one more item ticked off my list of things to do before I die." He sniggered. "In more ways than one. I mean, this next lot are scientists – I bet there are a few things I could show them. In the name of research, of course."

The light flared before them in much the same way as before, and two more figures were deposited onto the sand.

"My, but aren't _you_ a handsome one?"

In no time flat the taller of the two, a wiry, vaguely fishlike individual with impressively lurid eyeshadow, was beside them, an arm draped over Kurz's shoulders.

"Why don't you tell me your name, darling? No? The strong, silent type, eh? I can work with that. See, I'm new to this place, innocent as a lamb, and was wondering if a big, brave soldier like yourself could provide me with an escort, maybe show me the sights. Come along now – I can't wait."

Kurz threw her a pleading glance as he was frogmarched away, and the second of the new arrivals shrugged helplessly. She suddenly felt a great deal of fellow-feeling for him.

Reluctantly, they set out after their respective charges.

* * *

A day had passed, and Mithril's General Council had given their assent. After their slightly awkward introduction, the two organisations and their representatives had got on surprisingly well. Mithril, as far as Nanoha understood it, was a bit like a shadow UN, using its technological superiority and superbly-trained troops to topple dictators, resolve regional disputes, and generally work towards international peace and stability with efficiency, flair, and a pleasing unwillingness to overly abuse its authority.

Tessa Testarossa had effectively adopted Fate as an older sister, which her partner had been surprised but far from displeased about, and she was only too happy to help when Leeron and Yuuno had requested an interview with the Lambda Driver's operator to supplement their research. Said operator was currently stationed at Jindai High School in Japan, protecting one of the living Black Technology repositories called the Whispered, which was why they, the two captains, Tessa, and Kalinin had just employed the _Eventide_'s transporters to jump to a concealed position just outside the place.

The three mages deactivated their Barrier Jackets and waited patiently for their new guests to get their bearings back. One's first jump was always a bit disorienting, and they'd been given a quick guided tour of the _Eventide_ on their way. Tessa had even started to mutter to herself quite alarmingly, though this was fortunately swift to cease.

That had been the General Council's price for the Lambda Driver information, a naked attempt to covertly study the Bureau's technology, and the mages had happily let it go ahead. It wasn't as if their guests could replicate the stuff anyway, not without magic of their own. All of them were dressed in civilian clothes, either their own or borrowed from someone else, and they'd alerted those on their payroll at the school in advance, which should prevent too many awkward questions.

"So just what is it with Japanese students and the paranormal?" Fate asked. "I mean, there's you, Hayate, the SOS Brigade, and now this. It can't be a coincidence."

Nanoha smiled. "Sorry, I forgot – you were a mid-term transfer, weren't you? Must have missed the Tuesday morning lessons on 'Superpowers and How to Deal with Them'. Very comprehensive – the department got several commendations for it."

Her partner adopted an expression of exaggerated realisation, playing along. "Oh, right, yes! Just before Maths, wasn't it? Didn't the teacher retire after those allegations about her and the tentacle monster in Class 3-C?"

They continued to banter back and forth with an ease and familiarity that Nanoha had been missing for weeks, exaggerating the exploits of the fictitious class to quite thoroughly absurd levels until they could both barely speak for giggling. Beside them, Leeron checked out his makeup for the umpteenth time in his omnipresent hand-mirror.

"Why so fussy about your appearance?" Yuuno asked. "We're just visiting a school, you know."

"Correction – a _high school_, full of teenagers deliciously full of the bloom of youth. Though I am not so degenerate as to seriously pursue them, I can at least grant them a vision of beauty that shall last them to the end of their days. It seems a reasonable gift."

"Amazing. Just when I think you can't _possibly_ get any more disturbing, you somehow prove me wrong."

"I _am_ full of surprises, sweetie."

"You're full of _something_, I know that. Remember – cross the line, and I'll demonstrate _exactly_ what non-lethal energy attacks can do to a person."

"You keep saying that. Frankly, I'm starting to get a little intrigued."

"Leeron," Fate said wearily, "please stop antagonising the Bureau's leading expert on applied magical theory. I doubt anyone would appreciate a school and its environs getting turned into molten slag."

"Ah. Curiosity satisfied. My apologies, dear boy – hold on, you can _do_ that?"

"Not as well as a dedicated combat mage like Fate or Nanoha, I'll admit," Yuuno replied, his irritation derailed by the opportunity to discuss a subject he loved. "Most of my abilities are centred around defence, utility, and support; binds, shields, teleportation, et cetera. That said, I'm very good at repurposing spells for unconventional means. A bind can cut inanimate objects or even become an energy whip, a shield can be slammed into someone as a blunt instrument or charged to serve as a proximity mine, and as for teleportation... well, it's easier to list the things you _can't_ do with it, really. It isn't as versatile as using a shipboard transporter – you need to be fairly close to whatever you're about to teleport, it's a lot more difficult to move several things at once, and the charging time's a big problem – but that still grants you a _lot_ of leeway."

"Fascinating. Once all this is over, I should really write a paper about you people."

Tessa cleared her throat demurely. "I'm sure it is, but could we please save that discussion for when we're _not_ in the middle of a crowded urban area? Just for the sake of my mental equilibrium, you understand."

Yuuno gave a guilty start. "Right, sorry. Let's head off to the interview, then."

* * *

As it turned out, the school had already cleared a room for them – the nurse's office, to be exact. Their interviewee, a quiet, serious-looking young man named Sousuke Sagara, was waiting for them there, and saluted with the sort of crisp precision that would have made a drill instructor weep tears of joy as they arrived.

"Sir. Ma'am. Are these the TSAB personnel you mentioned?"

As Kalinin made the introductions with his typical brisk efficiency, Yuuno mentally reviewed the information Tessa had given them on Sergeant Sagara. Aged seventeen or thereabouts, a former child soldier, and owner of an exemplary combat record that placed him as one of Mithril's finest Arm Slave pilots. He had been on his current bodyguard mission for several months, and a not-insignificant part of the organisation's budget had been spent on compensating for his myriad well-intentioned indiscretions in the furtherance of said mission. The young submarine captain had spoken of him with no little concern, and Yuuno couldn't help but wonder if her feelings towards her subordinate were entirely professional.

Nevertheless, everyone there was at present a very model of stiff, formal military discipline. Further salutes were exchanged, the room was checked for bugs with quite unnecessary gusto, and eventually he, Leeron, and Sousuke were marched into the infirmary. They found seating where they could, and he gave the sergeant a businesslike nod.

"Right then, Mr. Sagara, we're going to be discussing your experiences using the Lambda Driver. How you made it work, its effects and side-effects, that sort of thing. Incidentally, please don't be too alarmed if my associate here starts hitting on you – he does that to everyone, and I mean _everyone_."

Leeron dismissed him with an airy wave. "Oh, ignore him, honey. For the record, I _love_ what you did with your hair. That half-feral look? _Very_ in at the moment. May I enquire as to who did it?"

Sousuke gazed at the Spiral levelly. "On my person at the moment I have one blackjack, two tasers, a telescoping baton, a garrotte, a holdout pistol, and four concussion grenades. How many of them am I going to have to use?"

"Orrr... we could talk about the Lambda Driver. I'm flexible."

"That's no problem."

* * *

In the waiting room, things were fairly uneventful. Nanoha was chatting animatedly with Tessa and Lieutenant Commander Kalinin about the workings of Mithril's Arm Slaves, but Fate couldn't really summon much enthusiasm for the subject. The hulking mechs reminded her just a little too much of the silent, murderous guardians that had patrolled the corridors of her mother's fortress, the Garden of Time. That left her with little to do but talk to the _other_ person in the room.

She was a girl of about the same age as Sousuke and Tessa, dressed in the Jindai High School uniform. Fate wasn't quite sure how she had found her way into an area supposedly reserved entirely for them, but seeing as nobody else seemed to be objecting to it, she supposed that it wasn't anything to worry about. _Maybe she's that Whispered Sergeant Sagara's supposed to be protecting? That would certainly explain the blue hair._

She leaned over. "Hello. My name's Fate. May I ask what yours is, please?"

The girl looked up from what appeared to be Japanese Literature homework. "Oh, hi. It's Kaname. Kaname Chidori. You're with Mithril, right?"

"Well, sort of. An affiliated organisation, anyway. You know about them?"

"Hey, it was pretty hard for me _not_ to find out, what with the world's most obvious undercover agent hanging over my shoulder all the time. In fact, that's the main reason I'm here – I already had to stop Sergeant Clueless from evacuating everything within a five-block radius to keep the meeting secure, and I wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to have another lapse of common sense halfway through. Seriously, sometimes I have to wonder who's supervising who."

"Oh? All we'd heard said that Mr. Sagara was quite the professional."

"Hey, don't get me wrong, he's good at the whole soldiering business. If you want someone to take an enemy position, pilot a giant battle-robot, or resolve a hostage situation, there's none better. It's just that he sees _everything_ as a military problem. Civilian lives may factor in, but civilian life doesn't, if you follow me. The stories I could tell you..."

Fate smiled. "Well, why not? They're likely to be in there for a while, and it isn't as if there's much else to keep us occupied. Except your work, anyway."

"Doubt I'm going to get much more done of that anyway – it's like walking through a tar pit. Tell you what – I tell you some of mine, and you tell me some of yours. Sousuke isn't exactly the most communicative of people; I rarely get much in the way of stories from the other side of the fence."

"Fine by me. I warn you, though, it might get a little... strange."

"Stranger than a schoolwide biochemical weapon threat caused by clothes-dissolving bacteria?"

"Depends on how you class discovering that your and your long-term girlfriend's new adoptive daughter is in fact a six-year-old custom-made clone of the local religion's _male_ Messiah-figure created to power an invincible, semi-sentient space-battleship."

"Wow, this I have _got_ to hear. Who's first, then?"

* * *

Nanoha walked back into the waiting room, accompanied by the two Mithril officers. They'd headed out to Sousuke's safehouse to use the wireless there, reporting on their status and reassuring Commander Mardukas, the _Tuatha de Danaan's_ Executive Officer, that his captain had not been (a) injured, (b) kidnapped, or (c) eaten by feral high-schoolers. Though Nanoha understood the merits of professional paranoia, she couldn't help but feel that sometimes it could be taken a bit too far.

Fate and Kaname were still talking to each other, she saw, though the subject of the conversation had changed rather.

"... so I just don't understand," the blue-haired girl said. "I mean, I _know_ he likes me – the way he accepted half-pay just so he could stay at Jindai High rather than being reassigned was a bit of a hint – but he hasn't acted on it in the slightest, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. It's not as if he's devoid of initiative, after all. Believe me, my life would be a _whole_ lot easier if he was. So that leaves... what?"

"Well," Fate mused, "you did say that he's very focused on protecting you. Maybe that's it?"

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Maybe he thinks his feelings are secondary to your safety? That pursuing a relationship might get in the way of doing his job?"

"Secondary... to... my... safety?" Kaname asked slowly, a vein twitching in her forehead. "Oh, that is IT! WHERE IS HE?"

It was Sousuke's grave misfortune that his interview with the two scientists ended at that point. No sooner had they exited the infirmary than he was beset by a horribly-grinning high-schooler.

"Come on, mister. We are going to _talk_."

The young sergeant was dragged out of the room at lightning speed, his normally-stoic face wearing an expression of utter panic. After a moment of exchanging bemused glances, everyone else decided to follow.

They caught up with them in the school's main yard, where Kaname was busily berating her bodyguard at maximum volume.

"... And _then_ you set yourself up as some shining, chivalrous knight, standing guard for some fair maiden who is of course _far_ too feeble to do it herself, suffering nobly all the while. Is that it? IS IT?"

Sousuke attempted a faint, futile protest.

"I mean, _hello_? I took out a trained assassin with a taser and a bathrobe! Does that sound feeble to you, huh? Does it? How many times am I going to have to tell you that _I can look after myself_? That I don't _need_ some thick-skulled guard dog shielding me twenty-four-seven, but maybe, just maybe, something else?"

She rolled up her sleeves, her expression changing from anger to iron determination.

"Right then, Sergeant Sagara, we are going to resolve this _once and for all_."

He started to back away, but Kaname was faster. Her arms shot out and grabbed the front of his shirt. There was a brief, frozen moment, and then she kissed him. Hard.

The silence that followed was interrupted by the click of a camera shutter, as a gaggle of students lurking around the corner gave Sousuke's expression the immortality it deserved.

Tessa, meanwhile, was not taking the situation well.

"Blowing his cover, fraternising with the mission objective... oh, he hasn't heard the last of this, not by a long shot. I'm going to bust him so low that he'd going to have to say 'sir' to a private. To the _bar staff_, even. Then, _then_ I'm going to..." She trailed off into incoherent, outraged mumbling.

Nanoha glanced at Fate. "Tell me, wasn't this precisely the sort of external upset we were supposed to be _preventing_?"

Behind them, Kalinin laughed. "Oh, don't worry. Most of us were expecting something like this to happen sooner or later anyway. I believe Sergeant Weber was running a betting pool on the subject, in fact."

He leaned in closer, keeping his voice low. "On an unrelated topic, when were you and your ship intending to leave?"

"Quite soon, actually," Fate replied. "A couple of days at most. Our research department is very efficient, you see. Why did you ask?"

"Well, I know that you're considerably in advance of us technologically. More importantly, I know that you can process and collate a planet's worth of information in very little time, and that you can break just about any cipher on the planet."

"This is about Amalgam, isn't it?" Nanoha asked.

"Precisely. I quite realise that you are under no obligation to help us, but we're up against significant opposition with _very_ unsavoury practices, and while we aren't losing yet, we aren't winning either. The data from your ship's scanners could very well turn the tide."

Nanoha considered this. "The Bureau generally prefers not to get embroiled in planetary politics. There are just too many things that can go wrong."

"Of course. I understand entirely – please forget I mentioned it."

"Wait – I didn't say that we _couldn't_ help you, did I? Frankly, we've been rather impressed with how your organisation operates – a high-tech, unaccountable, and heavily-armed secret society staying on the straight-and-narrow for more than an hour or two is practically unheard-of. I would say that if you haven't gone all 'shadow world government' yet, you're unlikely to no matter what we do. The thing is, though, such assistance would have a price. You would have to agree to have your planet relabelled as what we call an 'administered world', granting us the freedom to monitor it and ensure that our intervention hasn't had any unintended consequences. We're fairly hands-off mostly, but it's definitely something to consider."

He grunted. "Hrm. The Council won't like that. I have to admit, it does sound a bit like a deal with the devil."

"Oh, we're perfectly happy to explain what we can, can't and probably will do. We could even provide the legal documents if you so wish. Good communication's important in any diplomatic relationship, after all. Don't worry, though – there's no stigma for turning the offer down. Several worlds have in the past, and it just means less paperwork for us. It's entirely your decision, and we'll do everything we can to make it an informed one."

"Fair enough. I'll run it past the captain and see what she thinks. After she's entirely recovered, of course – I wasn't even aware that she _knew_ about that sort of language."

He started to walk off, but turned around again after a few steps.

"For the record, Captain Takamachi, we don't think of ourselves as being 'unaccountable' as much as 'accountable to ourselves'. It helps, I find."

"Ah? I'll have to remember that one. It'll definitely help with those recruits who think just because they've got an A-rank and an Intelligent Device they're gods among mortals. Whatever you decide, commander, I wish you and your organisation all the best. Incidentally, is Mr. Sagara _supposed_ to be turning that particular shade of purple?"

Kalinin cursed under his breath, and waded away through the gathering crowd to rescue his sergeant.

* * *

The _Eventide_'s barracks was a small, cramped space, really more of a glorified dormitory for those ground personnel not high-ranking enough to have separate quarters of their own. At this point in the evening it was fairly crowded with combat mages trawling through their washing, gulping down pilfered snacks from the galley, and doing all the other things soldiers did when they weren't being required to either shoot at things or fill out the omnipresent paperwork.

For Nanoha, it was quite pleasantly nostalgic, bringing back memories of the days when she, Fate, and Hayate were simply green NCOs finding their place in the service. She'd made an impromptu chair out of her bedclothes and several pillows liberated from empty berths on either side, and was currently reading an enjoyably trashy Mid-Childan romance novel whilst reflecting on the events of the remainder of their visit to the parallel Earth.

It had all gone rather smoothly – Leeron's mental agility and Yuuno's breadth of knowledge had enabled them to gain a great deal of information from the Lambda Driver (most of which they had shared with the Mithril techs), whilst the organisation's Intelligence branch had managed to tidy up the Jindai High School mess with their usual aplomb. Apparently, working with Sergeant Sagara had given them a great deal of experience in such matters. Hayate, meanwhile, had been discussing with the General Council whether or not they wanted to make their planet an Administered World; in the end, they had decided to defer the decision pending further debate and discussion with those few trusted politicians privy to their existence. For her part, the Bureau colonel had agreed to have another ship sent to check up on them in a week's time – or two, if they decided more elbow room was needed.

The door slid open, and Fate walked in, glancing around the room for a second before making a beeline to Nanoha. Everyone else present suddenly took a considerably more pressing interest in whatever they were doing at the moment, Corporal Nakajima in particular sorting her socks with a diligence more suited to open-heart surgery.

Nanoha adopted an expression of forced casualness as her partner approached. She couldn't help but wonder if it was even remotely convincing – it wasn't something she did very often.

"Evening, Fate. How did saying goodbye to Tessa go?"

The blonde captain spread her hands. "Better than it might have. The whole 'sorry I ruined your chances with that boy you liked' thing was a bit awkward, of course, but suddenly-discovered family's a nice thing to have, even if you're probably not even slightly related and one of you just arbitrarily decided that you are in fact family. We've agreed to keep in touch – even if they don't agree to Hayate's proposal, I can still send letters."

"Good to hear. Think we were that bad at her age?"

"I rather doubt that, but it was most likely due to lack of opportunity. Having a stable relationship will do that, after... all..." She trailed off awkwardly.

Before she could open her mouth again, Nanoha held up a hand. "Fate, I know what you're going to say, and you don't have to. You're still the girl I married, and _nothing_ is going to change that, all right?"

Fate shook her head. "Even if I don't have to, I want to anyway. I was upset about what happened with my mother and sister, and I dumped it all on you even though you didn't deserve it. I'm sorry."

"And I forgive you. After all, if you can tolerate me piling on the life-threatening upgrades, trying to solve every other problem by blowing it up, and generally being an overly-aggressive, workaholic ingrate, then I _think_ I can deal with one little row, eh?"

She stood up, put her arms around her partner, and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

"Come on – let's go to bed."

* * *

Yuuno and Hayate watched on the hall monitors as the door to Nanoha and Fate's room went from the 'Occupied' to 'Sleeping' privacy setting.

She turned to him and grinned. "Mission accomplished."

His answering smile was genuine, but she could still see the distant pain in his eyes. "Right. Mission accomplished."

She walked out of the security centre, giving him a gentle peck on the cheek as she went without being entirely sure why.

"You should get some rest too, Yuuno. I think you need it."

* * *

In the space above Bloodhaven, the armada of Iruel-class transports began to move, their collective mission finally authorised by their commanders and gods. Deep in their bellies, three million forearm-blades went _snikt_ simultaneously.

Fleshcrafter Allard would have been delighted.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, that was all very nice, wasn't it? Time to start dropping the nukes.

Incidentally, the first person to spot precisely where a fairly normal terrestrial paramilitary organisation managed to pull a fast one on the representatives of a hyper-advanced pan-dimensional civilisation gets a cookie.

I am aware now that the Sankt Kaiser was in fact female. Nevertheless, I decided to keep things as they were in the interests of ensuring that poor little Vivio's back-story was even more _impossibly bizarre_. A noble endeavour, I'm sure you'll agree.

Join me next week... and prepare for turbulence.


	19. Unexpected Guests

**18. Unexpected Guests**

Normally, New Kamina City was a noisy, bustling place, as one would expect for the capital of the galaxy-spanning Spiral Nation. Today, though, there was a stillness to it, a sense of quiet reverence. Crowds of citizens, human and beastman alike, had flooded the upper walkways, all jostling for the best view. The _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ had arrived in the system a day ago, and it seemed that there were two moons in the sky, the mighty Spiral flagship being kept at a safe distance to avoid untoward effects from its gravitic field on the planet's surface.

Teppelin Square had been cleared, the usually-crowded public space now serving as a giant parade ground to display those warriors being prepared for their mission beyond the stars. Rank upon rank of Grappal war-mechs stood immobile, headed by the gleaming red, yellow, and black _Gurren-Lagann_. Small groups of dignitaries walked between the sleeping giants, inspecting them and their pilots with fascinated awe.

Admiral Viral allowed himself a smile of quiet pride. They had come a long way in the decades since the War of Liberation, growing into a mature, peaceful civilisation where once they had been scattered, desperate refugees, living in fear of what loomed above. The fact that he had once been _part_ of 'what loomed above' was something he dismissed as largely irrelevant these days – a cushy job, a few dozen medals, and a well-deserved reputation as a war hero trumped getting repeatedly beaten up by his superiors for looking at them funny any day.

He glanced around, looking for familiar faces. President Rossiu was gazing down from one of the balconies overlooking the square like a benevolent elder deity, occasionally saluting the crowd with grave majesty. Viral's inhumanly sharp eyes could detect a faint bluish glow around said balcony, presumably generated by a force field. The man was a populist, not an idiot.

Just as the _Gurren-Lagann _was at the forefront of the Grappals, so were its pilots, Lieutenant-Colonels Gimmy and Darry, leading the assembled flight personnel, their uniforms pristine and almost as decorated as Viral's own. They had grown too – he remembered back in the Liberation War when they had been just a couple of scared, unusually lucky teenagers who had required constant bailing-out. Now, though, they were respected across the galaxy as peacekeepers and crusaders against injustice – neither was Kamina the Enkindler or Simon the Digger, certainly, but they were most definitely good enough.

All in all, the admiral was feeling fairly confident about the coming conflict. For all that the years of peace might have softened them, the Spiral Nation still had the courage, the power, and the technology to face any conceivable threat. He took a deep breath, stepped up to the podium at the head of the square, and began to deliver his prepared speech.

"Citizens of the Spiral Nation-"

He got no further. There was a horrible, viscous sound, and Gimmy's head came apart, spraying pink mist across the hull of his mech and the uniform of his co-pilot. She had no time to react, no time to even open her mouth, before the second shot punched right through her heart.

The third hit Viral right between the eyes.

He toppled backwards, his flesh beginning to knit itself together again even before he hit the ground. The back of his head slammed into the flagstones of the plaza, causing his vision to blur and his scalp to throb with sharp, hideous pain as his fractured skull repaired itself. He dived behind the nearest piece of cover, silently giving thanks for the immortal body that the dead Spiral King Lordgenome had given him, and attempted to take stock of the situation.

More shots were pouring in, eliminating scientists, politicians, and pilots with gleeful impunity. Some of the last tried to get into their mechs, either for protection or vengeance, but with little success. One bullet headed straight for the President, passing through the force field as if it wasn't even there. One of his bodyguards shoved him to the ground and the shot went wide, tearing off Rossiu's arm at the shoulder and going straight through his unfortunate guardian.

Viral tried to assess trajectory and fire patterns in an attempt to figure out where the sudden assault was coming from, but the closest vantage point in the most likely direction was a hill all the way outside the city. _So accurate at such a range... not even Yoko could manage that._

He scampered on all fours towards the nearest Grappal, using the available cover as best he could. The crowds had begun to panic, undulating like a sea as they attempted to escape from what they had originally considered a safe haven. Flailing bodies fell from the walkways, pushed over the edge by the terrified mass of people.

His oversized paw-hand grabbed the back of the Grappal pilot's uniform, dragging him behind the huge mech. Ignoring the bloody ruin that was the dead man's lower body, he rifled through his jacket pockets. At last he found the activation key, a crude imitation of the _Gurren-Lagann_'s Core Drill, and held its strap between his fangs as he scaled the war machine. A stray shot took off his foot at the ankle and he almost fell, instead relying on his three functional limbs as the appendage regrew.

Once inside, he quickly closed the cockpit, inserting the key and placing his hands on the grips with practiced familiarity. He was no Spiral, certainly, but he still knew his way around a Ganmen if required. He powered up the flight-sphere and took off, weaving through the convoluted tangle of New Kamina City's skyline.

Explosions mushroomed in the distance, toppling towers, blocking roads, and collapsing walkways. The attack on Teppelin Square was clearly not an isolated incident. Viral patched into the military comm-net, and found total anarchy.

"... some sort of commando teams... small but tough... _Lagann_'s bolts, they're tough... Stop them, stop them before they..."

"There's monsters in the streets, going after the civilians... Shit, it's a massacre down here."

"Air Marshal Shiki's down! I say again, Air Marshal Shiki is _down_! One of his aides turned into... something, I don't know what, and..."

"They're on the _Chouginga_, hell, I think they were here all along... planting bombs... some sort of bioweapon... so many dead..."

"Where did they come from? In Kamina's name, _where did they come from_?"

He cut across the chatter, attempting to stave off a total breakdown. "All units, this is Admiral Viral. Initiate Defence Plan 36B – we are under assault by a large-scale guerrilla operation. Remember your training, remember those we are sworn to protect, and above all remember that we are the Spiral Nation! Nothing is impossible to us! No enemy is undefeatable! Together, we shall pierce the heavens themselves!"

A ragged cheer echoed from the net, and Viral grinned a toothy grin. _That _was _how it went, wasn't it? What I wouldn't give to have a few more members of the Dai-Gurren Brigade at my back..._

That was then, though, and this was now. He had to make do with what he had – the true test of a leader was how they could adapt, whether to new situations, new assets, or, most importantly, new enemies.

They had never faced foes like this before – the Dai-Gurren Brigade had been created to fight robotic colossi in honourable combat, and that was what they had mostly ended up dealing with, plus the occasional swarm of lice-ridden bandits during the rebuilding after the War of Liberation. These... creatures were different. Ganmen and the Anti-Spirals' Mugen you could see coming, and bandits were never this well-equipped, this well-organised, or even this creatively vicious. He very much looked forward to administering a little payback.

Another detonation blossomed from the upper storeys of a nearby tower, and he rolled the Grappal to avoid it, his eyes still set on the high, rocky hill ahead.

* * *

The assassin leaned back, and watched the Spiral capital burn. It had been a textbook operation – send in the Divines to eliminate the sensitive targets whilst the Hellhounds tore apart the military and the daemons spread general chaos. The transports were still in the Warp, Divine Assassins summoning Hellhounds from them to attack precise locations as required. Though they were still somewhat vulnerable there, he had formulated a plan to deal with that problem that had been cheerfully authorised by the gods.

Looking up, he maximised the zoom on his mechanical eyes and was pleased to see explosions rippling across the surface of the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ like pinpricks of sickly yellow light. Lady Reigle's plague bombs were working as advertised. _Well, that should keep them from achieving space superiority any time soon._

All in all, everything was going according to plan. Everything, that was, except whatever maniac was trying to fly a building-sized war robot into him.

He took stock of his equipment. One Exitus-pattern rail rifle, accurate at ranges of up to ten kilometres with the appropriate training and augmentations (which he had), plus five clips of regular ammunition and one of the special phased penetrator rounds, adapted from the ancient Lance of Longinus in much the same way as the Angel Cutter blades popular with both his fellow-assassins and the Hellhounds. One standard-pattern bolt pistol. A full belt of Warp-powered grenade dispensers. _More than enough._

He levelled the rail rifle, slapping in the clip of PP rounds as he did so. The Grappal had opened fire, high-explosive shells chewing up the ground around him. None of them came particularly close, and all lacked the telltale greenish tinge that indicated Spiral Energy use – the pilot was obviously emotionally-compromised by the destruction of his home. _Makes my job much easier, I must say._

His first shot went straight up the barrel of the mech's enormous machine-gun, detonating it from the inside in a fireball that reduced its forearms to molten slag and scored deep rents across its chest. His second punched through its head into the flight-sphere on its back, shattering it and sending the Grappal crashing to the ground. His last two hit its exposed leg joints, immobilising it where it lay.

He ejected the clip, swapping it for one of regular rounds. No sense in wasting the rest of the valuable phased penetrators if he didn't have to.

The crippled mech's cockpit-hatch creaked open, and the pilot staggered out. For the first time that day, the assassin knew uncertainty.

_Hold on, didn't I kill you once already?_

The pilot was a tall, rangy creature dressed in the medal-bedecked blue uniform of a senior officer who could almost have passed for human if it were not for the oversized, clawed hands and the fang-filled mouth that twisted into a feral snarl as he regarded his assailant. _A mutant? No – must be one of those chimerical constructs the Spirals have living with them. Beastmen, I think they're called. That explains why he wasn't using the Grappal to its full potential, anyway._

All in all, he looked a great deal healthier than when the assassin had last seen him with bits of his head splattered across Teppelin Square.

He didn't waste time trying to figure out his foe's miraculous resurrection, though, instead taking aim with the rail rifle once more and shredding the beastman's torso with a full clip of high-velocity rounds. His target collapsed to the ground in an undignified tangle of limbs... before starting to get right back up again, his body regenerating with impressive speed.

The assassin started to fall back, firing off shot after shot at the advancing beastman. All of them hit, and none had any permanent effect other than further ruining his target's uniform. Slowly but surely, he was losing ground. _Time for a change of tactics._

He dropped the rail rifle, reasoning that he could retrieve it later, and pulled out his bolt pistol. This proved rather more effective, the miniature rockets lifting his pursuer off his feet and sending him tumbling down the slope, chunks of flesh flying in every direction. The assassin nonchalantly holstered the weapon and held out his hand beneath one of the grenade dispensers on his waist, allowing himself a satisfied nod as something heavy, round, and metallic dropped into it. He thumbed the arming stud, calculated the trajectory, and threw the fragmentation grenade down after the beastman, setting off after it a moment later. He didn't need to check to see if it had hit – he knew it had.

"_Exitus acta probat_," he muttered to himself.

He drew his pistol again as he approached his enemy's last resting place, but soon saw that it wouldn't be necessary. The grenade had done its work above and beyond his expectations, leaving nothing but a scattered mess of viscera and...

An inhumanly long arm shot upwards from behind a rock, its huge, gnarled fist hammering into his groin. His legs turned to water and he collapsed to the ground, the beastman looming in front of him. Its (he could no longer reasonably call it a 'he') flesh was reknitting with horrifying speed as it rained down blow after blow into his armoured bodysuit. He tried to bring his pistol to bear, but it was snatched from his grasp, crushed into mangled wreckage, and dismissively thrown to one side. The creature was roaring, reciting name after name as it pounded him.

He kicked out, catching it in the knee and causing it to crumple over beside him. As he tried to get away, though, it caught his leg and _squeezed_, crushing flesh, bone, and cybernetics with equal ease.

The assassin was dragged backwards, scrabbling desperately at the surrounding rocks, and the beating began once more.

* * *

Eventually, the red mist rose from his eyes. Viral stood up, gave the assassin's mutilated corpse a disdainful kick with his one remaining boot, and limped back down the hill.

He had a city to save.

* * *

The Grand Convocation Chamber of the New Republic Senate was in turmoil. As a central parliament for over a hundred thousand star systems it could be said that this was its natural state of being, but it was especially pronounced today.

"So allow me to summarise," Senator Borsk Fey'lya said, his deep, rich voice dripping with disdain. "Peace has returned after the longest period of political turmoil in living memory, we have finally begun to heal our wounds and restore order to the galaxy, and our children once more have the opportunity to grow and prosper in freedom. So what is the honourable Jedi Order's response to this? What do the self-appointed guardians of said peace and stability will? Why, nothing other than a return to conflict against an unspecified, supposedly terrible foe on the word of some shadowy order of self-described magicians who claim to come from another universe! Noble senators, does that sound _sane_ to you? Does that sound _reasonable_?"

There was a ripple of discontented mutters and calls of "Hear, hear!" from the floor.

"Even assuming that these extradimensional bogeymen, these 'Chaos Gods', do in fact exist, have we attempted to meet with them? To _reason_ with them? Of course not! We are glibly assured that they are wicked, deceitful manipulators, that no word they utter can be trusted. Do the Jedi have so little faith in our skills as negotiators that they must coddle us against the horrors of the universe at large, letting us play our own games while the grown-ups work elsewhere? I am sure I need not remind you, noble senators, of the consequences that arose when we _last_ placed so much faith in the reasoning of a Force-user."

"Did he just play the Palpatine card?" Senator Ferron Hykso muttered to his neighbour. "_Please_ tell me he didn't just play the Palpatine card."

"I'm afraid so," Senator Val Wrynn replied, idly scratching at the eyepieces of his mask.

"Well, there goes _his_ credibility."

"I'm not so sure," the Kel Dor politician replied slowly. "He's making some good arguments. Master Skywalker's faction may face some genuine opposition here."

Hykso stared at him, and he threw up his three-fingered hands in surrender. "Well, apart from playing the Palpatine card, of course."

Meanwhile, Fey'lya was winding up to the end of his speech. "And so, ladies, gentlemen, and indeterminates of the Senate, I say to you... WHAT THE KRIFF IS THAT THING?"

The indicated creature stood calmly in the upper tiers of the chamber. It was dressed in a matte-black armoured bodysuit with a white, skull-shaped mask concealing its face. The fingers of one hand were tipped with long, metallic talons engraved with faintly glowing runes, whilst the other held an enormous, brutal-looking sword that was toothed like a chainsaw. The dismembered bodies of three senators and their staff were strewn around it – Hykso could only assume that the Senate's chaotic floor-plan and general hubbub had kept the murders undetected.

The creature spoke in a quiet, emotionless voice that nevertheless managed to carry to every part of the chamber.

"_Fear me, for I am your apocalypse_."

That was when the screaming started.

The assassin vaulted down into the mass of terrified politicians, carving a bloody trail through them. The chamber's inhabitants scattered like herd animals before a predator, but the intricate, symbolic seating arrangements conspired against them, creating natural chokepoints wherever those attempting to escape were _not_ becoming hopelessly lost. In those first few minutes of the attack, more were trampled to death than caught on the assassin's blades.

Hykso dragged Val Wrynn through the crowd, yelling into his headset for his bodyguards to attend him. His only response was an ominous silence. _Why didn't we see this coming? Why weren't we warned?_

They exited the chamber, swept along by the living tide through the maze of passageways beneath. It was only once they had almost reached the main foyer that said tide began to slow, and they heard more screaming from up ahead. They rounded a corner, and saw the cause.

The assassin's attack had not been without purpose – it had been intended to frighten its prey, driving them down into a trap. They attempted to turn, to run back the way they came, but the stampeding crowd blocked their escape.

The last thing Senator Hykso saw was the second assassin's goggles, burning with a hellish red glow as the creature closed in.

* * *

Two floors above, Luke Skywalker was attempting to shape the Senate Building's defences into some semblance of order. He had borrowed a comlink from an injured Republic soldier, and was employing it to get a feel for the situation. Meditation might have proven more effective, but meditating while a berserk killing machine was firing off what appeared to be directed fusion blasts at you and your troops was not what he deemed to be the wisest course of action.

He had directed several squads towards the lower floors to deal with the second assassin, but the sheer congestion meant that they probably wouldn't arrive there for another five minutes, and he was uncomfortably aware that every second might cost another life. In the meantime, though, he had other things to deal with.

One squad had set up an E-WEB repeating blaster on one of the upper balconies, pouring down fire on the assassin. Despite its best efforts, several shots hit, gouging molten craters in its armour, and it snarled, slagging the gunners' position with a shot of its fusion pistol and leaping into the remainder, chainsword roaring. It was then that the heavy blaster's power packs cooked off, going up in an explosion that hurled the assassin to the chamber floor. The remaining soldiers wasted no time in taking advantage of its temporary incapacitation, rushing out of cover and firing shot after shot into it until it finally stopped moving. Luke had just started to breathe a sigh of relief when the creature started to twitch and writhe once more, before exploding in a shower of acidic bile that melted holes in the tiles for fifty metres around it.

"Primary target has been eliminated," he reported through the comlink. "How are you doing on the secondary, lieutenant?"

"No longer a problem," the Senate Guard officer replied shakily. "Senator Kerrithrarr got 'im before we could arrive. Tore him apart."

Luke winced. _Death by angry wookiee – not a pleasant way to go._

"How is the senator?"

"Dead, sir. That assassin-freak exploded when he died – turned most of the corridor into steaming goop. There were at least a dozen casualties just from that."

"... I understand. How is the evacuation going?"

"Most of the surviving civvies are out – Senator Fey'lya was surprisingly helpful with co-ordinating that mess – but we still haven't heard from the Chief of State or his staff. They headed for the roof, towards his private craft."

"Thank you, lieutenant. I'll check that out." He turned back to the soldiers accompanying him. "Stay here for the moment. Sergeant Garlak, you have command."

Not waiting for a reply, he sprinted away towards the rooftop landing bays, leaping between the tiers and balconies of the Grand Convocation Chamber with precise applications of the Force. He drew on it further, feeling its power infuse his limbs, and accelerated, igniting his lightsabre as he went.

For a moment he wondered how the assassins had managed to bypass the guards so easily, but dismissed it. _We can figure that out once everybody's safe._

Even before he entered the Senate Building's departure lounge, he knew something was wrong. The smell of blood and other unnameable things hung thick and heavy in the air, and waves of darkness seemed to pulsate from the room. _Something terrible happened here._

He slid open the door, and entered hell.

There were over twenty people in the room – bodyguards, senators, clerks, and diplomats. Not a single one was alive. Each had been killed in a different way – decapitation, strangulation, and evisceration were amongst the least creative. Chief of State Ponc Gavrisom had been plucked, dismembered, and sculpted into a twisted imitation of a gamebird at a banquet, placed on the table in the middle of the room like a grotesque offering.

The third assassin unfolded himself from the shadows in the corner, his artificial eyes glowing with giggling insanity.

"Hello, Master Skywalker. Do you like my little arrangement? Don't be shy now – I'm sure there's room for one more."

An ordinary human might have felt rage, terror, or some similarly strong emotion at that point. Luke, however, simply felt... calm. Tranquil. The complexity of his life seemed to fade away, collapsing into a simple tunnel with him at one end and this grinning butcher at the other. He rushed forwards, lightsabre raised, without saying a single word. The assassin shrieked in delight and moved to intercept him.

They exchanged a single blow each, and a body fell to the floor.

Luke sheathed his weapon and walked away. He had no desire to stay in this place any longer than was necessary.

Behind him, the assassin exploded in the same manner as its colleagues, filling the room with cleansing acid and taking away just a little of its horror.

* * *

Across the New Republic, garrisons and listening posts fell silent, overwhelmed by a tide of hideous monsters and shadow-skinned infiltrators that seemingly came out of nowhere. Galactic communications collapsed, plunging entire systems into isolation, and entire fleets vanished, swallowed by nameless predators. Through it all flew the Yuuzhan Vong, plunging towards the young civilisation's heart with god-given speed and burning everything in their path with unholy glee.

Rudely awoken from its dreams of peace, the galaxy screamed into the long night that crept over it like a shroud.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another week's instalment of the Doorstop, in which things are starting to look very grim indeed. Also, we learn that when a Spiral Knight dabbling in mad science makes you immortal, he damned well makes you _immortal_.

I can definitely imagine bringing up the Emperor in a debate being roughly equivalent to Godwin's Law in the New Republic. It only makes sense, after all.

Oh, and if you find yourself agreeing with the Expanded Universe's top political sleazemonger in this chapter, relax – that was quite intentional. Might still want to grab some antibiotics just in case, though. Can't be too careful.


	20. Moving In

**19. Moving In**

Almost as soon as they arrived back at the central office, the _Eventide_'s crew were abruptly turfed off the ship pending an extensive refit. No-one questioned this – they all knew what was coming. The initial offensive was soon to begin, and the First Expeditionary Force would be at its forefront.

Everyone who had shore leave booked headed to the surface of Mid-Childa immediately, there to meet friends and family, grab a moment's relaxation, and generally enjoy the comforts of civilian life one last time. By the end of the day, though, most of them had returned to settle into their new quarters. The entrance lobby was crowded with mages of all shapes and sizes, uniformed or otherwise.

The first order of business was allocating rooms. The whole point of the move, after all, was giving the First more spacious quarters in deference to its pivotal role in the war effort, and Hayate, Fate, and Nanoha had spent most of the afternoon alongside Quartermaster Krebs, figuring out who would go where. Before heading off to check on his beloved library, Yuuno had conjured an interactive table detailing the arrangements onto one of the lobby walls, and it was this that most of the crew were gathered around. Mostly, they seemed to be satisfied, though there were questions here and there.

"Umm... excuse me," Erio said, "but why are Caro and I sharing a room, please?"

"Most of the officers' rooms were doubles," Hayate explained. "We put several people in those – Fate and Nanoha, me and the Wolkenritter, and a few others – but we still had one left over, and we reasoned that we might as well give our two youngest recruits an alternative to the main dormitory. You don't object, do you?"

"No, no, it should be fine." He saluted, his young face as comically serious as ever. "Thank you for your consideration, ma'am."

Hayate saluted back, struggling to keep the smile off her face. "Not a problem, private."

She turned to the assembled crew. "Starting tomorrow, we will be going into full war footing. All leave is cancelled, and you will be embarking on a comprehensive program designed to prepare you for your first direct confrontation with the enemy. Said program will involve combat simulations and weapons training supervised by Captains Signum and Takamachi, as well as full briefings on Chaos's known equipment, troop dispositions and capabilities administered by Captain Testarossa-Harlaown and Chief Librarian Scrya. Attendance is mandatory. Dismissed."

The crowd dispersed with varying levels of enthusiasm – Hayate noted with amusement that Corporal Nakajima was practically dragging a reluctant Corporal Lanster off to see their new quarters. Once they had left, she nudged Fate in the ribs.

"Did you see that look Caro was giving Erio?"

"No – why?"

"That young man had best watch his back, that's all I'm saying. Or other body parts, as the case may be."

The blonde captain sighed. "They grow up so fast, don't they? Maybe we'd best give them the Talk sooner rather than later."

"I'm afraid I'll have to leave that one to you, Fate," Nanoha said wryly. "Giving it to Vivio was traumatic enough."

"_Vivio_?" Hayate exclaimed. "Nanoha, she's _ten years old_!"

"And has a combat form that looks about twenty. Worse, she's picked up a bad habit of changing into it and sneaking out of school. I had to spend an entire weekend getting every bar in the catchment area to put her on their 'evict and report' list, and that's only a stop-gap measure until I can convince Shamal to plant a tracker on her Intelligent Device. At least I know where she got that language from now."

The colonel winced. "Ouch. And here I thought the theological implications of adopting the Sankt Kaiser's reincarnation would be bad enough. Has the school found out yet?"

"No, but it's only a matter of time, I suppose. It's a pity – Sister Hilda is such a nice old lady. She really doesn't deserve that sort of shock."

"She's caused a lot of inconvenience, hasn't she?" Hayate mused. "Vivio, that is."

"Oh yes. Tonnes." Nanoha smiled. "And we _still_ wouldn't give her up for the world. Erio or Caro either. I imagine it's the same for you and the Wolkenritter."

"Hah – you have _no idea_. For all your kids have put you through, at least they never came up with some cack-handed scheme to restore you to health that involved magical muggings, conjuring the forces of darkness, and endangering an entire planet. Shamal was coming up with excuses for that for _weeks_ afterwards, you know."

They were quiet for a moment, reminiscing.

"When was the last time the TSAB engaged in all-out war, do you think?" Nanoha asked finally.

"As opposed to just a heavily-armed police action?" Hayate replied. "I don't know. Not in our lifetimes, certainly."

"And now we're responsible," Fate concluded. "Hayate, do you think we're doing the right thing?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. I really don't. If only we had time to deliberate, to negotiate... but that's what the Suzumiyaverse and the home of the Stargates both tried, and look where it got them. As is, further hesitation would just put more universes in danger. These 'gods' only seem to view others as either tools to be used or threats to be removed, and you know what _that_ outlook always ends up needing."

"Befriending?" Fate suggested.

The colonel smiled. "Yep. Befriending."

"I wish you wouldn't call it that," Nanoha grumbled.

"Nanoha, dear, when dealing with a proven scientific phenomenon, it's only appropriate that we use the proper terminology." She sighed. "Well, things are what they are, I suppose. All we can do is try to make the best of whatever hand we've been dealt, and right now that means ensuring the kids we're responsible for don't end up getting themselves killed in their first real fight."

The auburn-haired officer chuckled. "You are aware that quite a few of those 'kids' are older than us, right?"

"Commander's privilege. Anyone lower-ranking than yourself is de facto younger. Well, except for Signum. And a couple of the support staff. That's pretty much it, though. Oh, and for heavens' sake don't tell Signum I said that."

"Is this the same 'commander's privilege' that allowed you to access our medical records?" Fate asked, an eyebrow raised.

Aghast, Hayate turned to Nanoha. "_You told her about that_?"

"_And_ followed your example, Miss Easily-Dehydrated. Don't forget to be nicely-rested for tomorrow's training, and try not to inhale any peanuts during the night, hmm?"

With that the two captains departed, giggling like teenagers. Hayate stared after them, speechless, before turning round and stumping off to her office.

Signum was waiting for her there, a faint smile on her habitually stern face. "I did warn you that that was a mistake."

"You heard. Joy. Look, can we _please_ not talk about it? How's our security, by the way?"

"The technology is good – the design, not so much. I made some temporary patches to the holes that should see us through for the moment, but I will be requisitioning a full refit as soon as is convenient."

"How big are the holes?"

"Significant. To use an Earth-specific comparison, I believe that an intruder up to and including the size of a cockroach could gain entrance with little inconvenience."

"A _cockroach_? Signum, don't you think you're overreacting a little?"

"Not at all. As we saw during the Scaglietti Incident, that is not an unfeasible size for a surveillance or assassination drone, and we can only assume that technology has advanced in those areas in the years since then."

"Fair enough. Just try not to wreck the entire department, all right? We only just moved in, after-"

_Colonel!_ It was one of the perimeter guards, almost shouting down the link. _Colonel, they-_

His panicked voice was cut off abruptly. Hayate tried to regain contact, but the link was dead. So was every other she tried. She relayed this information to Signum.

"Nothing for me either, Mistress Hayate." _Does the Tome of the Night Sky's internal network still function?_

_Bit choppy, but it's working._ "An attack?"

"That seems the most likely option. By whom, though, and from what direction?"

"I'll check with Shamal – maybe she can help."

_Shamal, this is Hayate. Comms are down, and we think we've got intruders – might have taken out a few of our people already. Mind having Klarer Wind take a look?_

_Of course._ Shamal didn't question the orders – they both knew that if Hayate was asking, she had good reason. There was a brief silence. _You're right, Hayate. It'll take me some time to figure out precise location and numbers, but we have unknowns inside the perimeter. Human-sized, and moving fast. Shall I prepare the infirmary to receive casualties?_

_Good idea. Zafira, warn the rest of the crew._

_At once, Mistress Hayate._

She turned back to Signum. "Shall we-"

"No. Your magic is not suited for a fight like this – wide-area bombardment will not help us on board a space station. You coordinate the defence while I ensure your safety, is that understood?"

Hayate nodded in acquiescence to her bodyguard. "Understood. Good luck, Signum."

The Wolkenritter simply smiled and walked out.

_Mistress Hayate,_ Zafira's voice said, _I am under assault. My previous mission is now impossible. I am retreating to the infirmary – I shall help Shamal set up a fortified position there. My apologies._

_Not your fault, Zafira. Did you get a visual on the enemy?_

_Negative – it was an ambush. I had to retreat in some haste. I can say, though, that they are using both exotic projectile weapons and magic. Assuming that they are working for Chaos, it seems most likely that they learned the latter from Alicia and..._

Both knew what other name he had been thinking of. Neither wanted to say it. _Understood. Transfer the data you obtained to the other Wolkenritter and keep me updated on further developments._

_As you wish._

Hayate stared at the door where Signum had been a moment earlier, feeling the creeping helplessness that was every commander's worst nightmare.

_At the moment, I can only speak to three people. Two are trapped, and one is fighting to protect me. What am I supposed to coordinate here? What am I supposed to _do_?_

* * *

In the corridor, Signum heard the automatic door close behind her. She stood at a T-shaped intersection, one passageway in front of her and two to her sides. Closing her eyes, she touched the pendant at her throat.

"Laevantien, Knight Armour."

There was a curious flowing sensation as the Ancient Belkan equivalent of the Mid-Childan Barrier Jacket slid over her body, and she drew her sword, swiping it experimentally in the air a couple of times before breaking open the hilt and flipping in a pair of cartridges. It snapped back into shape with a satisfying _click_ and she held it in front of her in the guard position. Whatever threatened her mistress, she would be ready for it.

She didn't have to wait long. Four lithe, black-clad figures appeared, two from the central corridor and one from each flank. They wore scorpion-like helmets and each had a pair of long, dull grey blades protruding from their forearms, flat across the backs of their hands. None of them said a word, simply advancing with inhuman speed across the floor, the walls, and in one case, the ceiling.

She regarded them calmly, mentally calculating distance and timing. The First had not had the time to get their power limiters restored since their return, but the station's dampening field would prove handicap enough, and Agito was undergoing her scheduled maintenance all the way on the other side of the station. _Very well. I had best warn them._

"Unknown intruders, you have entered a restricted area. Surrender now and you shall be arrested as criminals against the Time-Space Administration Bureau, with all the legal rights that entails. If you do not, I shall be forced to apprehend you, and the current situation means that I may have to employ lethal force. Which do you choose?"

Their only answer was a barrage of crystalline projectiles and magical blasts.

* * *

Fleet Admiral Thundra's first clue that not all was right with the world was when an explosion flowered from the enormous Government Tower, the former army headquarters that dominated the city landscape, lighting up the dimming evening sky and obliterating Mid-Childa's parliamentary chambers. He stared in horror at Naval Command's external monitors, watching as the tower bent in half with slow, terrible grace before the top part detached and fell into the city below.

"Wilson!" he yelled. "WILSON!"

"Sir?" his normally-unflappable aide replied, looking decidedly flapped.

"Get me Disaster Planning and Rescue. Not the main branch – that's in GovCentral. _Was_, anyway. Try one of the district offices and work from there. We need to clear up that mess, organise an evacuation. Jechter, find out what caused that blast. I'm betting it wasn't an accident."

"You'd win that bet, sir," one of the comms officers replied. "We're getting reports of a full-scale invasion. Creatures matching the description of 'daemons' from the Bloodhaven and Suzumiyaverse files, plus high-tech special-ops backup. They're all over the city, hitting civilian and military targets alike."

_Shitfire._ "Contact High Command – no, wait, they were in the tower too. What about Army HQ?"

"No response, sir. The wreckage fell right on top of their position. We're trying to patch together some sort of command structure involving the local garrisons and law-enforcement, but it'll take a while. Hours, maybe. The link to Air Command is still operational, but it's patchy. They were amongst the first places the invaders hit, and it sounds like they're barely holding them off."

"Screw patchy. Punch me through, Rodriguez."

"Aye-aye, sir."

"...miral? ...at you?" The voice of the Air Force comms officer was faint and laced with static. They could hear screams, explosions, and the myriad other sounds of magical combat in the background.

Thundra grinned. "Damn right it is. Heard you could use some-"

"Naval Headquarters, come in!" It was another voice on another channel, panicky and desperate.

"_What_?" the admiral growled, annoyed at the interruption.

"It's Corporal Merak, sir. Perimeter security. We've got an intruder – no, more like a fucking _juggernaut_. Went straight through my squad – weapons did nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. Headed your way, sir, if he doesn't- _gyaaah_!"

There was a horrible, fleshy sound, and the feed cut off.

Thundra mentally enumerated every oath, curse, and obscenity he could recall. "Sorry, AirCom, but you're going to have to wait a little longer. Do we have this... whatever-it-is on the cameras?"

"That's a negative, sir," one of the security techs replied. "Wait – it's more than that. The security cameras are _shutting down_ – at least, the ones on the most direct route to us are. It's like it's draining the power from them."

"A localised anti-magic field?"

"That's my guess. Powerful one, too. Don't think our patrols have the firepower to punch through it."

"Understood. Pull back everyone with combat training to here. We'll try a concerted assault. I am _not_ retreating from our last operational command post, understand?"

The headquarters swung into action, clerks, technicians, and combat mages alike fine-tuning the security systems, assembling makeshift barricades, and checking their Devices. There was only one person who was not engaged in some sort of frenetic activity, and that was their liaison with the Integrated Data Entity, Emiri Kimidori. She simply stood in a corner, her mild blue eyes watching the proceedings with impassive curiosity.

_Knew we couldn't rely on that bloody machine to help us,_ Thundra thought sourly.

The intruder arrived later than he'd anticipated but sooner than he'd hoped, kicking apart the reinforced steel door with no more than a couple of blows. Immediately, all within opened fire, unleashing a dizzying array of magical blasts, bolts, and other projectiles. Even Wilson had joined in, summoning massive arcs of lightning from a delicate-looking cane. Thundra was already behind his desk, not wishing to put either his fragile shields or his even more fragile eyesight at risk, but even he was frantically pulling the trigger on his massive arbalest-Device, sending shot after shot in the general direction of the enemy and using his farsight to coordinate the barrage. It didn't count as cowardice if hiding actually made you more useful, after all.

Not a single spell reached its target.

The creature was swathed in darkness, revealing only the occasional, contradictory glimpse of what lay within. All they could tell was that it was tall and humanoid, with an enormously large, asymmetrical head of which one feature was prominently visible, though whether it was an oversized eye, mouth, or some bizarre combination of the two was hard to discern. Every attack was absorbed, dissipated, or diverted by the darkness, gouging a plethora of holes out of the already-abused walls and doorway behind it. Thundra's magically-charged iron bolts, meanwhile, simply unravelled in midair, collapsing into sparkling dust.

The admiral poked his head out of cover, his eyes widening in astonishment. "What _are_ you?"

It grinned a disturbingly perfect grin, pearly-white teeth gleaming against the shadows. "_That which is unknown and unseen always commands the greatest fear_."

There was a scream from the forward barricades, and a combat mage charged at it, raising his axe-shaped Intelligent Device above his head. He brought it down onto the assassin... which caught it with one shadowy appendage. The axe shattered, rust crawling across it with impossible speed, and the mage fell to the floor, overbalanced. The assassin picked him up and punched an arm straight through him, before tossing his mangled carcass aside and turning back to the command room's remaining defenders.

Its eye-mouth expanded and bolts of darkness lanced from it, turning those it hit into withered, desiccated corpses. The survivors scuttled for cover, firing shot after ineffectual shot at the apparition as it inexorably advanced.

Everyone, that was, except Kimidori.

Thundra hadn't even seen her move – one moment she was in her favourite staring corner, the next she was standing in front of the assassin, arms akimbo.

"I apologise, agent of Chaos," she said softly, "but I cannot allow you to continue."

It launched an experimental blast at her, but it passed straight through, impacting on the base of Thundra's podium. She made a strange chattering, bubbling noise, and the darkness vanished, revealing a slim, almost androgynous figure in a black armoured bodysuit. He wore a massive, skull faced helmet, one eye replaced with an enormous, stubby cannon that seemed to be wired directly into his brain.

He cocked his head to one side. "You are no mage."

"I am Emiri Kimidori, a Humanoid Interface of the Data Integration Thought Entity. And I have chosen my side."

She raised her hands, unleashing a wall of flame that hurtled into the assassin. When it dissipated, there was nothing left but twisted, charred wreckage.

She looked back over her shoulder, still calm as ever. "There is still much to do, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra. I would advise that you make haste."

Thundra nodded stoically, refusing to be upstaged by a machine. "Not a problem. What's the situation?"

"Bad, and getting worse," Rodriguez replied once he had returned to his station. "It's not just the city – we're getting distress calls from all over Bureau space, and we've lost contact with several facilities and outposts including the central office itself."

"Understood. Direct nearby patrols to assist the worst hotspots. Are the troops in the city taking and holding ground?"

"Negative, sir – just attacking and moving on."

"Then it's a raid. Good. All we need to do is run damage-prevention until the enemy are exhausted. How are the DPR folks doing?"

"They're badly overstretched. Too few people, too much damage. Hell, they're getting into front-line combat more than our actual soldiers. On the plus side, we're getting reports of survivors from GovCentral – even some of the parliament managed to make it out alive. The Chief Administrator's gone, though, and so are most of the cabinet. It was a full-house session when the bomb went off." Rodriguez's face was grey. His brother worked on the Agriculture Minister's staff, Thundra remembered.

"Message coming in from orbit," Wilson reported. "It's Admiral Harlaown, sir."

"Patch him through," his superior replied wearily. _What is it now?_

Chrono Harlaown's youthful face appeared on the main screen, looking as professional as ever. "Sir, we have detected a small fleet in the dimensional space near our position. Around a dozen ships of the same configuration as the transports from the scouting mission from a few weeks ago. We believe that they are the source of the invaders, and are moving to engage."

"Roger that, Harlaown. Will you be needing backup?"

"Should be fine, sir, but more ships are always welcome."

"Hrm – you listened during my lectures. Good. I'm sending elements from the Second Fleet to support you. No risks."

"Aye-aye, sir."

"Jechter, bring up a display of the space around Mid-Childa."

"Sir."

A dimensional map appeared, and he watched intently as the symbols representing Chrono's forces crept towards the enemy. Time crawled by, seconds seeming like hours, until the admiral's voice spoke again.

"Sir, we have made contact. Resistance is greater than anticipated – we've already lost the _Helena_, the _Morning Star_, and the _Charak's Gift_. We believe they're employing two or more Q-ships."

"Q-ships?"

"Freighters or transports with their cargo bays replaced by additional weapons and shields – warships in sheep's clothing, so to speak," Wilson explained.

"Ah, I see. Harlaown, what did I tell you about borrowing Earthborn naval terminology? It's habit-forming."

"Sorry, sir. Enemy vessels are well-shielded – point-defence systems and MIS are proving ineffective." There was a telltale flare of green light, and he turned away from the screen.

"The Arc-en-ciel is working as well as ever, though," he added with satisfaction a moment later.

Another few minutes passed, during which the remainder of the command centre's staff returned to their stations. They could clean up the mess from the attack later.

"Enemy forces are retreating," Chrono reported. "We haven't inflicted that much damage on them yet – presumably they have fulfilled their mission objectives."

"Understood. Second Fleet will pursue and intercept. Relay your logs to them, and return to Mid-Childa. Do you have combat mages on board?"

"Armed and ready, sir."

"Glad to hear it. Prepare for immediate ground assault – first objective is to reinforce Air Command, but we'll be providing more as the situation develops. You'll be heading into a populated urban area, so watch your fire."

"Aye-aye, sir. Admiral Harlaown out."

Thundra sat back, allowing himself a moment to gather his thoughts. "Kimidori, you Interfaces seem reasonably effective against those assassin-creatures. Can we rely on you to eliminate the remainder inside the city?"

"Of course, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra."

"Anything more from the central office, Rodriguez?"

"No, sir. Still not responding. Do you think...?"

"I _think_, lieutenant, that we have an invasion to repel. Get a hold of yourself, and do your job. Is that understood?"

"S-sir."

Thundra went back to surveying the monitors. _We can survive this, I know it. But at what __cost?_

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Again, this was written before ViVid. I liked this version, though, so I'm not changing it. Artistic license, baby.

So what happened in the Stargate universe? Why did the Mid-Childan Ground Forces' HQ get the refurbishment and name change? Why did Kimidori's powers work on the assassin? Fear not, all these questions and more will be answered... eventually.


	21. Office Politics

**20. Office Politics**

Nanoha was sitting up in bed, scheduling the next day's training with the aid of a datapad and stylus, when the door exploded inwards, obscuring the entrance to her and Fate's apartment in a billowing cloud of smoke. She was already rolling to one side, scrabbling for Raising Heart's pendant on the bedside table, when two small, round objects bounced and rolled into the room.

The pair of photon flash grenades detonated simultaneously, blinding and deafening her, and she curled into a foetal ball, panicky animal instinct overcoming training for one precious moment. As she recovered, blinking her eyes dazedly, she saw a black-clad figure striding through the door, extending two long blades across the backs of its hands with a menacing _snikt_.

"You not move," it commanded in a harsh, tinny voice clearly unused to human speech, firing a stream of jagged, evil-looking crystals from its helmet-gun for emphasis.

The tiny pendant had fallen to the floor less than a metre away, but it might as well have been light-years. Nanoha slowly raised her hands above her head, knowing she wouldn't have time to charge an attack... and realised that the bathroom shower had stopped.

"Plasma Smasher," Fate's voice said quietly, and a massive beam of pale yellow light slammed into the Hellhound, demolishing the dividing wall in the process.

Her partner was already in her Barrier Jacket, hair still wet from the shower. She strode out of the wreckage of the bathroom, Bardiche's head still levelled at the enemy's unmoving form.

"Think insurance will cover that?" Nanoha asked lightly. Leaping out of bed and grabbing Fate in a flying hug, she decided, would not be the most tactically viable decision in a combat situation.

"They decided to berth combat mages here. They knew the risks." Fate scooped up the pendant and threw it over to her partner. "Wonder why we weren't warned about this? Security should have picked him up on the way in."

"Comms are down, maybe?"

"Seems that way."

Nanoha stood up, triggered her own Barrier Jacket, and slapped a full clip of cartridges into Raising Heart.

"Right," she said. "Let's get to work."

* * *

Fred and Gunther were unhurriedly wandering back to their respective rooms when they heard the sounds of battle ahead. They exchanged a wordless glance and picked up the pace, hurrying towards the commotion, though Fred would have personally preferred heading _away_.

As they turned the corner, they saw the cause. Signum was locked in combat with two Hellhounds, dancing out of the way of their attacks and countering with lightning-quick ripostes of her own. Though she was covered with cuts and bruises, her enemies had fared worse. A third cyborg lay at her feet, very obviously dead, whilst a fourth was attached to the ceiling some distance away by a gleaming, blade-tipped arrow almost as long as he was tall.

As they watched, she brought her sword down in a diagonal slash, ethereal flames rippling along its length, and neatly bisected one of the remaining two. No sooner had she done so, though, than she had to duck a blow from the final Hellhound's forearm-blade, her movements slowed by the sheer number of minor injuries she had attained. The warrior-cyborg had been expecting that, though – indeed, _relying_ on it. A reddish-purple magical blast lanced out from its other hand, striking the Wolkenritter at point-blank range and hurling her backwards.

Fred heard footsteps beside him, and saw that Gunther had broken into a run, popping his Jacket with a flash of emerald light. _You old idiot..._ He tried to follow, to catch up, but soon fell behind, cursing his lack of exercise.

_Boss, you're pushing retirement age, you're using a standard-issue Armed Device that I know you can't hit the broad side of a barn with, and you're going up against something that just defeated a centuries-old sentient killing machine. Just what are you planning to do here?_

A moment later, he found out.

Gunther didn't bother opening fire – he simply charged in and hit the Hellhound over the head with his staff, crumpling the scorpion-tail gun on its helmet with the sheer force of the blow and stunning it for a few vital seconds. He followed up with a few heavy swings to the midriff, driving it further and further back, and for one glorious moment, Fred thought he was going to win.

Then the Hellhound lashed out with one of its blades, passing through the quartermaster's wards as if they didn't exist, slicing his weapon in half, and gouging a shallow cut across his chest. He staggered backwards, almost falling over, and the cyborg was on him in an instant, unleashing a flurry of blows that he barely managed to avoid. Blood spattered the floor as more impossibly fast slices found their way through, and Fred tried to take aim, but the two combatants were simply too close together for him to be sure he'd hit the right one.

"_Schlangenform_," said Laevantien's metallic voice from near the floor.

Fred glanced down and saw the sword lengthen and spread out into a long, bladed whip. Signum flicked her wrist, and it coiled around the Hellhound's legs, causing the creature to stumble. She tugged, hard, and the stumble turned into an awkward, tangled fall.

Gunther wasted no time taking advantage of the situation, holding the broken halves of his staff like daggers and plunging them into his foe's back again and again. Once he was sure that it was dead, he straightened up, offering a bloodstained hand to Signum. She took it gratefully.

"Quartermaster."

"Ma'am."

Fred, meanwhile, was staring at the deceased Hellhound, which still had the two abbreviated staves buried somewhere in the region of its kidneys. Gunther, he recalled, was not terribly good at using magic without a functioning Device.

"We need to get you two to an infirmary," he decided. "Is ours still open?"

"Indeed," Signum replied. "Shamal and Zafira have it secured for now. Sergeant-major, you will need to alert the non-combatants – we have lost communications. We should be able to proceed on our own."

Fred saluted. "Aye-aye, ma'am. May I ask what's happening?"

"Chaos has arrived. _Move_, sergeant-major. We have little time."

Another salute, and he hurried away. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Gunther and Signum hobbling off towards the infirmary, both attempting to keep the other upright. Fred couldn't see his old friend's face, but knew it was wearing an enormous, foolish grin. _Lucky for some, eh?_

He ducked into the nearest alcove he could find, reactivating his own Intelligent Device. His wrist-watch took on a golden sheen, the casing expanding and reshaping itself into a simple, elegant console.

_Sol, this is Fred. You there?_

No response. He muttered a spell, boosting the signal, and a series of deep blue charging rings appeared around his wrist. That done, he attempted to contact Deep Space Surveillance again. This time, he got through.

_Fred, good to hear from you!_ Dr. Kamri exclaimed, sounding even more flustered than usual. _Two of them attacked us. We suffered casualties – lots of casualties – but we managed to take them down. I didn't know Touran used a Modern Belkan style, though. The things she did with that wrench... I'd prefer not to think about them. What are you calling about?_

_It's the communications blackout, Sol. I think you can help. Remember that project you told me about? That collaboration with Comms to boost the range of their network? Do you still have the hardened line to their office?_

_That we do, Fred. I'll patch you through – do you want a three-way link?_

_Would certainly help. Thanks, Sol. I owe you one._

_Enough to replace the cookies?_

_Not on your life._

A third voice entered the conversation. _This is Sergeant Picanto of the central office's Communications Department. Kaiser's blood, but it's good to hear a friendly voice. They killed everyone over here. _Everyone_. I hid, but... I don't know if they're coming back._

_Stay frosty, Picanto,_ Fred replied, trying to sound calm and authoritative, and privately wished he'd obtained a smaller percentage of his combat experience from old action movies. _I think I've got an idea on how to turn the tables on them. Did you figure out how they're jamming us?_

_It's not an anti-magic field, that's for sure. Way too specific. It's only hurting the telepathic network, and it's especially targeting military channels. That's probably why we can talk in the first place._

_A tailored curse?_ Kamri surmised.

_Most likely, but it's more than that. It's learning, adapting. We're losing channels all the time. It's like they let a living creature loose inside the station's systems, a predator. I saw the ritual when they summoned it – hell, I don't think I'll ever be able to forget it. They took a few alive in the initial attack, used them as sacrifices. The screaming... sweet hellfire, the screaming. There's blood all over the consoles, forming this network of runes. I try to clean it away, but it keeps coming back. It keeps coming back!_

He was losing his grip again, Fred realised. _Picanto, listen to me. How do we stop it? How do we kill this thing?_

The comms officer's voice steadied, though it was still faint and uncertain. _Well... it's a spell. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, but it's a spell nonetheless. Dispelling it should work, but I don't know where you're going to find a mage powerful enough._

Fred grinned. _Perfect. That's where you come in, Sol._

_Me?_

_Yep. It's that collaborative project again. Most of your gear works as a sort of magical radar, sending out powerful signals that get bounced back in a way that tells you what's out there, right?_

_You were paying attention when I told you about that?_ Kamri sounded utterly stunned.

_Not just a pretty face, Sol. Anyways, from what I know about the project, you were trying to diversify the signals sent, turning your sensor arrays into a crude but powerful Magical Interface System. How'm I doing so far?_

_Pretty good. It would have worked, too, if we'd had the funding. Still have the plans somewhere, but I don't see what this has to do with... ohhh, right. We'll still need someone skilled in dispel magic, though. The system magnifies, it doesn't create. A familiar, maybe?_

_Way ahead of you, Sol. One of Colonel Yagami's bodyguards is an Ancient Belkan Guardian Beast – pretty much the same thing. Better, I know where he is. Getting him to your office might be a bit trickier, though – I'll see what I can do. You two hold the fort in the meantime, got it?_

_Got it,_ Kamri said.

_Just be quick,_ Picanto advised. _No telling which system it'll go after next. Things could get real ugly, real fast – and that's coming from the guy who just saw his supervisor's guts dangling from the ceiling._

Fred cut the link, stepping out into the hallway once more. _So this is what command feels like? They can keep it._

A gurgling roar sounded from behind him and he spun around, seeing a decaying, vaguely female form charging at him with yellowing claws extended. He acted purely on instinct, raising his Intelligent Device and taking careful aim.

"Chronal Shift!"

A cone of fine blue mist billowed out from the Device's front, clinging to the daemon's body. Its charge was slowed to the point where it appeared to be moving through treacle. A tortoise could have outpaced it, let alone a slightly overweight quartermaster sergeant.

Fred ran for the catering section, horribly aware that the spell could disperse at any moment. It was crowded when he got there – they'd been cleaning up after the evening meal when the attack started. Now most of the staff were huddled behind counters and overturned tables, pointing an impressive array of weaponry at the entrance.

He clambered over the salad counter with an agility born of adrenaline and terror, feeling his overworked limbs complain vociferously as he did so.

"Daemon-freak on her way, boys and girls," he gasped. "Show me you remember Captain Takamachi's training."

This was met with an enthusiastic cheer, and Devices of all shapes, sizes and classifications were brandished in anticipation. The daemon entered shortly after, still shaking off the lingering after-effects of Fred's spell, and promptly vanished in a barrage of multicoloured explosions.

He grinned. "Nice work, people, nice work. Anyone up for a little escort mission? Think it's time we show the combat mages exactly what we support staff can do."

* * *

The Hellhound crept through the sleeping quarters, his bionics ensuring silence and his enhanced senses scanning the area around him for potential victims.

The powers of the Warp were not well-suited for uniformity, and soon after their conception the clones had amassed a collection of quirks and oddities that could generously be called 'personalities'. Personality implied hierarchy, and ever since they had been herded onto the transports, this particular Hellhound had been on the bottom of the pile. As a result, he had little incentive to assist his pack-mates in charging to their doom when he could just as easily slope off and find someone (or several someones if he was lucky) to play with until the shooting stopped.

He had been especially interested in some of the things he had seen on the indoctrination tapes provided by Mislaato. He would have to give that a go if he got the opportunity.

He heard voices from further along the corridor and advanced towards them, listening intently.

"A double-bed. Perfect. Just perfect. I _specifically_ asked for twins, and do they listen? Do they hell."

"Aww, c'mon, Tea, there's nothing we can do about it now. Let's just get to sleep."

"Oh no no no. _You_, missy, are sleeping on the floor."

"But Tea..."

"But me no buts, Subaru. I _know_ you, and I know that you would take the opportunity for a quick bit of groping faster than I could say 'harassment'. Seriously, I could have reported you five times over by now. Be grateful with what you've got."

There was a brief silence.

"Oh, you are _so_ not using the puppy-dog-eyes. We formally agreed that those are dirty fighting, remember? Completely unfair. Well, forget it. It's the floor for you, and that's final."

Another pause.

"OK, maybe the settee."

Yet another pause.

"All right, all right, you can use the bed too for just this one night. The _slightest_ hint of wandering hands, though, and you're out on your ear, and let the record show that I was coerced into this against my will."

As the Hellhound came closer, he saw that the door was open. _Too easy._ He strolled through it, still as silent as ever, and saw two girls in their late teens standing by the bed, dressed in rather utilitarian-looking pyjamas. Both were definitely attractive, though he still felt that having them naked, screaming, and covered in blood would be a significant improvement.

The scene was frozen like that for a few seconds, none of the three moving, and then his forearm-blades went _snikt_ and everything exploded into motion.

He charged forward, spraying the walls around them with shots from his splinter pistol, and they moved as one, grabbing a pair of small, innocuous-looking objects from their respective bags and swinging them up to take aim at him. He suddenly found himself gazing at the business ends of an armoured gauntlet and an enormous pistol, and felt a ghastly sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Revolver Cannon."

"Crossfire Shoot."

He was unconscious before he even hit the ground.

* * *

Corporal Teana Lanster snapped a pair of handcuffs onto the comatose Hellhound, firing another low-powered blast into his head to ensure he wasn't playing possum. Meanwhile, her squad-mate, Corporal Subaru Nakajima, was watching with interest.

"Where did you get those, Tea?" she asked.

"Standard-issue for the Capital Defence Forces' Investigative Branch," Teana explained. "Not all of us are good at binds, you know."

"Those don't look very standard-issue, though. What's the label say? 'Berlinetta's Marital Aids and...'"

"We've got armed infiltrators in the central office and you want to discuss my personal life? _Priorities_, Subaru."

"Right, sorry. But what do handcuffs have to do with-"

"_Subaru_!"

"Coming, coming... No need to get so cranky, Tea."

Teana pressed her fingers to her temples until the urge to murder her best friend went away, and stepped out to confront the invaders.

* * *

Erio Mondial was sprawled in an agreeably oversized armchair, flicking through the yellowed pages of an Ancient Belkan combat manual. He wasn't sure quite what he could gain from the archaic language and faded illustrations, but Captain Signum had said it might prove useful when she lent it to him, so he'd resolved to read through it to the end. If there was one person who knew about those sorts of things, it was the Wolkenritter's Knight of the Sword, after all. Even Fate said she'd learned a few things from her.

He heard the bathroom door open, and the First Expeditionary Force's resident summoner, Caro La Rushe, walked out. He very pointedly didn't turn around as she got dressed – though he had the funny feeling that she wouldn't mind all that much, that wasn't really the point. Things had changed in the past few years – once, Caro had just been _there_, a good friend and someone useful to have at your back during Bureau business, but nothing special. Now, though, she was... well, he wasn't sure _what_, exactly, but he was always uncomfortably aware of her presence.

He felt something small and hard butt against his leg, and looked down to see the third resident of their room, Caro's pet dragon Friedrich, sitting up and begging, his horned head tilted appealingly to one side. There was a collar around his neck, etched with runes of restraint for much the same reason that the central office's dampening field existed. Though Fried was well-trained, a creature who could switch from the size of a small dog to the size of a bus was something that nobody wanted to take any chances with aboard a relatively cramped space station.

Another gentle headbutt, and he sighed, reaching down into his pocket and retrieving a dog-treat he'd bought earlier that day from a Mid-Childan pet store. He tossed it over to the little dragon, who caught it in midair, swallowing it in a single gulp, and fluttered over to land in Erio's lap, chirping delightedly. He absent-mindedly stroked his head, trying to ignore the various fabric-related sounds coming from behind him. _Do dragons have these sorts of problems, boy? No, didn't think so._

Eventually said noises ceased, and Caro leaned over his shoulder (fortunately fully-dressed by now). "Hi, Erio. Anything on summoner tactics in that?"

Her damp hair brushed his face, and he attempted to keep his voice from turning into a high-pitched squeak. "N-no, sorry. I did ask Captain Signum about that, though, and she gave me another book all about it. It's over there, on the pile."

She favoured him with a bright, sunny smile that made his internal organs turn a somersault, before running over to the indicated stack of young-teenager miscellanea. "Thanks – you're the best!"

Erio was still attempting to restore his mental equilibrium when the door to their quarters shot off its hinges, propelled though the room by a carmine magical blast. A small, metallic sphere followed it, and his combat instincts kicked into action.

"Sonic Move!"

He leapt forward with eye-blurring speed, activating his Barrier Jacket as he did so, and caught the grenade, throwing it back the way it had come. No sooner had it left his hand, though, than it exploded, hurling him backwards and overloading all relevant senses.

When he came to, it was in a pile of rubble. He sat up groggily, probing himself for injuries, and was relieved to note that his Jacket had taken most of the damage. Three tall, black-clad figures had entered the room, moving with a speed that almost equalled his own. Friedrich lay in the middle of the floor, his head severed from his neck. The cluster of scorch-marks on the attackers' bodysuits and around the ruined entrance bore mute testament to his final stand. Caro was sobbing in the corner, the psychic backlash of her pet's death searing her mind.

Detecting movement, one of the Hellhounds began to turn towards him, but not nearly fast enough. Filled with a quiet, cold rage quite alien to his usual personality, Erio pointed Strada's tip at the creature's chest, activating the spear's jets and letting it drag his battered body behind it. The impact pinned his foe to the wall, but the young mage wasn't done. He drew back a fist, surrounding it with a sphere of crackling yellow lightning.

"_Shiden Issen_," he snarled, and punched the Hellhound in the face, allowing the force of the explosion to push him back, unsheathing his weapon from its body in the process and leaving the creature to slump to the ground, immobile.

He spun round, leaping over a low slice from the second assailant and slamming Strada's oversized head into its helmet, activating the lateral jets to give the impact just a little more force. It staggered backwards, dazed, and he took the opportunity to look around.

_Where did the third one go?_

A fist smashed into the back of his skull and he saw stars, dropping his spear and almost falling over. The third Hellhound wrapped an arm around him, immobilising him and lifting him off the ground. He felt the edge of an impossibly sharp blade against his neck, and smelled the stink of blood, presumably Fried's.

The second Hellhound had done the same with Caro, he saw. He attempted a brave smile, which she returned through her tears. _We can get out of this, I know it. Fate and the others will rescue us. You'll see._

"W-what are you going to do with us?" he asked his captor aloud, feeling the blade nick his throat.

It gave a rasping, mechanical chuckle. "Make you useful."

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Oh, it is _on_.

I suspect that the Hellhounds would present the TSAB's close-quarters specialists with some serious problems, even ones as deadly as Signum. Let me put it this way. You're up against something that's at least as fast and strong as you are, and quite possibly more so. None of the defences you rely on so much would work against them, and they've got twice as many weapons as you have. Three times as many, in fact, if you factor in the helmet-gun... and you'd better, unless getting a face full of poisoned, crystalline needles appeals. Not only that, but their augmetics mean that they're inordinately difficult to put down permanently. Not nice. Not nice at all.

Finally, for those who haven't watched the series... no, Erio and Caro aren't related by blood. Just thought I'd make that absolutely clear - the modern TSAB is permissive, but not _that_ permissive.

See you next week!


	22. Getting Connected

**21. Getting Connected**

Zafira surveyed his forces, wishing that he could say something to encourage them, to prepare them for what he knew was coming. He'd never been much of a talker, though, content to follow where others led. _Like a good little doggie,_ Arf had once commented snidely. He'd refuted it at the time, loftily claiming that he was nothing like the docile modern 'familiars' of Mid-Childa (at which she'd laughed and done something to his elbow that still caused it to twinge in damp weather), but now her words came back with the horrible ring of truth. _I am no leader._

There were six of them, discounting him; the least injured of the infirmary's residents. They were invariably young, green, and very, very scared – and he had to admit, they had good reason. Originally, there had been ten, each assault on their position claiming another life as they intensified.

The last had been the worst – a tall, pretty girl of no more than sixteen, ripped apart and eaten by daemons as they tried to clear a path for Signum and the _Eventide_'s quartermaster. They had managed it in the end, escorting the two half-dead captains into Shamal's waiting arms, but the young private's screams still echoed in his ears. He resolved to learn her name if they ever managed to get out of this.

_Another wave incoming,_ Shamal's voice said tiredly. He didn't blame her for her lack of enthusiasm – the constant healing spells and scans for enemies had practically drained her dry.

He relayed the information to his troops, watching them react with calm resignation, and felt an odd surge of pride. No matter how dire the situation, they would not abandon their comrades.

They heard the daemons before they saw them – a cacophony of howls, roars, and shrieking laughter alongside other, less comprehensible things. Those who had Devices gripped them tightly, taking careful aim. Corporal Movano scattered shield-mines across the walls, floor, and ceiling, whilst one of the privates – Tipo, he thought her name was – patched up their wounds and blessed their weapons. As she laid her small hand on his massive gauntlet, he saw a faint turquoise aura suffuse it. He gave her a brief smile of thanks, and she responded with a nervous salute.

Then the enemy arrived, and their brief reprieve ended.

They were a living tide, a cavalcade of bizarre forms and horrifying visages. Most were humanoid, in a way – shadow-faced, kilted wizards, armoured warrior-women, pincer-handed succubae, and decaying, stringy-haired plague victims, each with their features and characteristics exaggerated to grotesque, inhuman extents. Warped, oversized animals accompanied them – tatter-winged carrion crows, iridescent, ethereal hawks, hulking, red-skinned hounds, and strange, unnatural creatures that looked like a mismatched hybrid of snakes and scorpions.

The swarm charged towards them, trampling over the splintered remains of the tables and hospital beds that had once formed a makeshift barricade. Two hatches opened in the ceiling, and a pair of balls of dented, broken wreckage that had once been security turrets slid down to confront the new targets, their shattered sensor arrays swinging back and forth blindly. It wasn't just the living defences that had been worn down by the previous attacks.

"They've got specialists, sir," one of the recruits noted, and Zafira saw that he was right. Two dark figures leapt and sprinted through the horde, forearm-blades extended, and Movano barely managed to raise a shield before their first shots smacked into it.

"Steel Yoke!" The Wolkenritter flicked out a wrist, sending a ribbon of ice-white energy slicing through the daemons' front ranks and causing those it hit to explode into sparks, dried blood, or clouds of gas according to type and preference. His troops followed suit with their own attack magic, and soon the rapidly-closing space between the two forces was criss-crossed with bolts, beams, and projectiles of all possible (and some fundamentally impossible) classifications.

Another few metres, and Movano detonated the mines, felling yet more of the daemons and slowing their advance. Zafira followed it up with a spell of his own, spears of pure magic lancing out from every available surface and into the beleaguered swarm. _Curious – nothing we've used yet has been lethal, and yet they vanish when we hit them. Magical constructs, perhaps?_

The attendant Hellhounds, however, were very much not. They barrelled out of the sorcerous inferno, wards flaring, and headed straight for Movano. Zafira attempted to get there first, to shove the corporal out of the way, but was too late. The lead cyborg's blade sliced through both his shield and the young mage himself, killing him instantly. Emboldened, the remaining daemons surged forward, and all semblance of order in the battle dissolved.

The Guardian Beast leapt into the melee, switching between forms at a moment's notice and employing fists, feet, teeth, and claws to strike down anything not wearing a Barrier Jacket or TSAB uniform. Tipo's aura served him well, its very touch unravelling the daemons' essence. He bled from a hundred scratches and bites, but simply ignored them. They were irrelevant.

A Hellhound charged him and he went wolf, diving under its blades and savaging its nether regions, his magically-augmented natural weaponry tearing through its armour with contemptuous ease. As it doubled over, he resumed human form, punching upwards and snapping its head back with a sickening _crunch_, and followed up with a kick to the stomach as it feebly attempted to retaliate. Even this didn't stop it, as he discovered when it stabbed upwards from the floor and nearly disembowelled him. He stamped on its head, feeling metal crumple under the impact, until it stopped moving, and turned his attention elsewhere.

Two more recruits were down already, one dismembered by the winged warriors' axes and one dragged away by the succubae with a terrified, animal scream that went on far longer than it should have. Corporal Ascona, their other Belkan mage, had cleared a space with his whirling scythe-flail Armed Device, a weapon he referred to as a _kusarigama_, and Zafira ducked into it, hoping for a chance to better assess the situation.

He didn't get much of an opportunity, though.

The second Hellhound dropped from the ceiling, cutting through the kusarigama's chain and riddling Ascona with crystalline bullets. He howled in pain and collapsed, twitching, to the ground as a reddish-purple spider's web of inflamed capillaries spread across his skin. The cyborg aimed a second salvo at Zafira, but he'd had time to raise a ward and the shots pattered harmlessly off it.

"Chain Bind," he growled, and a mass of ice-white tendrils shot from his hands, wrapping themselves around the Hellhound.

He grabbed the magical chains and pulled to the side, exploiting his greater body-weight to swing his victim around, battering away the encroaching daemons. Two more revolutions, picking up speed each time, and he let go, sending the creature flying down the corridor into the enemy's oncoming reinforcements. He was under no illusion that that would kill or even incapacitate it, but at least it would buy him some time.

He hurried over to check on Ascona, but the corporal was already dead, his back arced convulsively and his face twisted into a rictus of agony. Though the servants of the Tome of the Night Sky were considerably more durable than any real human, Zafira was very glad that none of the crystals had hit him.

The daemons surrounding him closed in, savouring his slow realisation of just how horribly outnumbered he was. He'd lost sight of his remaining two recruits, though disturbances in the crowd behind him reassured him that they still lived – for now, at least. He closed his eyes and prepared to summon more of the magical spears, resolving to take as many of these monsters down with him as he could.

That was when a volley of blasts came from behind, ripping into the assembled daemons sand causing them to turn to meet the new threat.

"Think you'd best get out of the way, sir," said a cheerful voice, and the Guardian Beast's keen ears heard over two dozen Devices charging bombardment-level spells.

He wasted no time, clearing a path to the infirmary door with a field of ice-white spikes and gesturing for his now-revealed recruits to follow his lead. Ignoring the stunned daemons, he broke into a dead run.

One of the junior mages was the first to reach the door, riding a shield-shaped Device like a surfboard. He dived inside, and Zafira was about to follow suit when he heard a distressed yelp from the third of the infirmary's still-living defenders – the support mage, Tipo. He turned round, and saw her being swamped by a pack of daemons, still firing away desperately with her staff.

_No. I am _not _losing another one._

He shifted to his wolf-form and rushed forward, extending a shield ahead of him like a battering ram and sending creatures of all descriptions flying. By the time he reached Tipo, they had already immobilised her with claws, jaws, and tentacles. Two daemons were tearing off her Barrier Jacket, whilst a third was twirling her captured staff suggestively.

Zafira switched back to human, impaling the gathering monsters with precisely-aimed spears and scooping up the support mage in his arms. He bolted back to the infirmary, leaving a shield-mine behind for good measure, and heard the ominous silence that told him their reinforcements' Devices were about to fire.

_I am running for my life with a half-naked and not unattractive young woman draped over me, _he noted absently. _Half a dozen centuries ago, I would have still found something mildly interesting about all this. These days, I am merely relieved that she is lighter than Signum. Whoever said that war was glamorous is a filthy, filthy liar._

The unknown voice spoke again. "All right, people – let 'em have it."

The barrage struck just as he exited the corridor, and he felt it sear the cloth off his back. He deposited Tipo as gently as he could, and turned back to watch the light-show.

He didn't find it entirely to his satisfaction, though.

The last Hellhound danced through the firestorm, flipping over some blasts and using its daemonic comrades as shields to block others. Its eyes were invisible behind its helmet, but Zafira knew they were locked on his.

He felt a hand on his arm, and heard Tipo's voice.

"Lion Strength."

His hands flared with turquoise energy, and he felt a surge of power shoot through him. The Hellhound leapt, and he slammed his fist into its solar plexus, sending it flying backwards, limbs flailing, for a second time. It came into contact with one of the larger beams and collapsed to the ground – though not before the Wolkenritter had set up a few magical spikes to greet it on the way down. He still remembered what it had done to Ascona.

He looked down, and nodded to his rescuee. "A useful power you have there."

She only managed a wan smile – one's first near-death experience was not conducive to conversation. She was scarcely more than a child, he saw – far too young to be dealing with something like this. _So many of them are._ Nevertheless, he could see that she was a survivor. How she had reacted to the daemons' assault was a good indicator, and a Guardian Beast soon learned to trust his senses. There was something about her that reminded him of Hayate at that age, beyond the vague similarities in height and build.

"I shall watch your future career with interest, private. Shamal, would you mind getting her some spare clothes and some medical assistance?"

His fellow Wolkenritter walked over, drying her hands from the infirmary's wash-basin. "Of course. Will you need patching up as well, Zafira?"

"Unnecessary. My wounds are not sufficient to impair me, and there are others who require your assistance more. Perhaps later."

He concentrated for a moment, and restored his ruined tunic with a quick infusion of will. That done, he stepped back into the corridor to meet their rescuers.

They were not what he had expected – a rag-tag assortment of almost fifty caterers, cleaners, and support staff, brandishing an equally motley arsenal of equipment and led by a pudgy, middle-aged man in a sergeant-major's uniform and a short, grandmotherly-looking woman wielding a Device shaped like an enormous meat cleaver. Despite this, they carried themselves like soldiers, subduing and restraining those enemies who were still corporeal (not many, and the daemons had a habit of dissolving when bound) and posting lookouts to ensure against unpleasant surprises.

As he approached, the sergeant-major flipped him an inept salute. "Evening, sir. I'm Quartermaster Sergeant Jones. Looks like we got here just in time."

"Indeed. Your arrival was most fortuitous."

"Oh, it wasn't just luck, sir. We were headed this way anyway. You'd be the Wolkenritter's Guardian Beast, right?"

"The tail, yes? Always gives me away."

"And the ears."

"True. Very well – what did you wish to speak to me about?"

"My idea for getting the comms back online. I'll need your help, sir – with your permission, of course."

"Hrm. We should head inside, then. Shamal and Signum are there, and something like that requires an officer's perspective. I am merely a specialist, after all."

"Fine by me. In that case, shall we bring Lieutenant Weismann along?" He indicated the elderly Head of Catering, who was currently sawing off a particularly obstinate daemon's head with her cleaver. "She's the field commander here – I'm just the ideas guy."

"So why were you coordinating the attack?"

"Because it was a low-responsibility job, and I like to feel important every so often. Is that so wrong?"

Zafira grinned a grin that only a wolf-type Guardian Beast could manage. "Sergeant-major, I believe this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

* * *

As they entered, Signum looked up wearily from where she lay on one of the beds. "Quartermaster Sergeant Jones, did I not request that you alert and safeguard the non-combatants?"

Fred Jones's face was the very picture of injured innocence. "Well, ma'am, that's exactly what I did. Not my fault they wanted to join in the fun, was it? I was just compelled to tag along and ensure they didn't get themselves into anything stupid."

Zafira had been on the receiving end of the knight's patented eyebrow-raise before. He was very glad that it was aimed at someone else this time.

"'Stupid' such as leading a charge on an army of daemons?"

There was not a twitch, not the faintest flicker of motion on the sergeant-major's round face. "Precisely like that, ma'am."

Signum glanced at her neighbour, a wiry, bespectacled man who looked to be in his mid-fifties. "Is he _normally_ like this?"

"Why I seldom give him orders," he replied.

"I see. Sergeant-major, I commend you and your associates for your timely rescue. That said, if you creatively misinterpret my orders one more time I will introduce you to new and exciting worlds of pain. Is that understood?"

_This_ salute was rather tidier than the one he had first seen. "Yes'm."

The gaunt quartermaster let out a dry chuckle. "Should learn how to do that."

Fred fixed him with an accusatory glare. "Traitor."

Signum smiled. "I _have_ found some uses for it over the years. It is all about establishing-"

"_Don't encourage him_!" the sergeant-major wailed.

Shamal moved to intervene, and Zafira saw that she was having great difficulty keeping a straight face. "Pardon me, Mr. Jones, but you mentioned a plan?"

"Ah, yes. Let me explain..."

It took scarcely ten minutes, against the backdrop of Shamal's orderlies tending to the living and moving away the dead. During that, the expressions of those assembled traced the full gamut of incredulity, bemusement, fascinated horror and gallows-humour amusement. Eventually, Zafira spoke.

"So... allow me to summarise. You intend to have us and a small band of non-combatants blast our way across a station under assault by ravening monsters in order that I might hook my brain up to an untested, jury-rigged device of incredible power and do battle with a sentient, predatory curse. Am I correct?"

"Apart from the fact that the DSS office isn't all that far away? Yeah. Pretty much."

He barked a laugh. "Good to see you catching on to how we do things around here, sergeant-major."

Fred shrugged. "I'm a fast learner. Anyone else have anything they want to add?"

"We still need to keep the infirmary safe," Shamal pointed out. "Mrs. Weismann, would you perhaps be able to help with that?"

The cook smiled at her as one would at a favourite niece. "Certainly, dear. I'm sure some of my kids would be happy to oblige. Some of them have a bit of knowledge of healing magic, as well – you'd be _amazed_ at the sort of things that can go wrong in a ship's galley."

"Excellent," Signum said, businesslike as always. "Sergeant-major, Specialist Zafira, prepare your troops and alert me when you are ready. I shall relay the information to Mistress Hayate. Dismissed."

They dispersed to tasks appointed by themselves or others, ingrained Bureau discipline overruling inexperience, injury, and the dozen other factors that might have paralysed ordinary civilians. Zafira headed back for the entrance to check on the defences, absent-mindedly wishing that someone had bothered to fit an automatic door on the infirmary. _It is not as if the TSAB lacks the budget, after all..._

He was about to shove open said door when he saw the neatly-stacked pile of bodies next to it. Their brightly-coloured Barrier Jackets had vanished upon death, leaving them in a haphazard assortment of night-wear, off-duty clothes, and the brown TSAB uniforms. Someone had folded clean, white towels over their faces as a gesture of respect – those of them that still _had_ faces, anyway. Or heads.

Zafira had seen a lot of corpses in his centuries-spanning life. Given what he was, it sort of went with the territory. That didn't mean he _enjoyed_ it, though – especially when he recognised a few of them, and knew that they had been far too young for such savage, abrupt endings, regardless of whether there even _was_ a definable 'old enough'.

_I want their names,_ he told Shamal.

_Whose?_ she asked.

_Those who volunteered to defend this place. The ones who lived, and the ones who died. I want their names._

Her voice over the telepathic link was quiet and gentle as always. _You'll get them._

_Thank you._

Back outside, he watched Fred Jones's ad-hoc army assembling for their next mission, and smiled a contented smile. He had people he trusted giving him orders, things he cared about to protect, and a truly vile enemy to fight. _Just what this old dog needs._

_No more failures. No more deaths. Now, we begin to reclaim our home._

* * *

Hayate was having the busiest half-hour of sitting at her desk in her life. As a matter of fact, she'd had to borrow one of Yuuno's mental tricks to deal with it – a custom accelerator spell that enabled her to run her thought-processes on three tiers at once and, more importantly, _not_ become hopelessly confused in the process. One tier was monitoring the various holographic displays projected by said desk, one was processing the communications from the Wolkenritter, and a third she had permitted to wander aimlessly, lest the continued tension drive her slowly insane.

At present, two of the projections in particular were occupying her attention. One was an annotated list detailing what she knew so far of the enemy's nature, capabilities, and potential weaknesses, whilst the other was an enormous three-dimensional map of the central office that looked rather like an imploded mechanical sea-urchin. An accurate depiction, therefore.

She moved her hands across the latter, manipulating it as if it were a physical object rather than a technosorcerous illusion. There was a cluster of labels around the location of their headquarters, denoting all the information she had about the disposition of their and the enemy's forces – which wasn't much, really, given the comms blackout. The map had still proven useful, though, if only for suggesting alternate routes for Zafira's strike team and alerting them to potential ambush sites.

A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she glanced at her office's external monitors. Something had caught the pop-up turrets' attention, and they were bathing one of the adjoining corridors with waves of azure fire. Whatever-it-was beat a hasty retreat, and the turrets slid back into their housing with a nonchalant satisfaction that she was only halfway-sure was imagined.

Though Hayate knew that Signum would look upon her incapacitation as an unmitigated failure, her stand (and the intervention of Quartermaster Krebs, which had led to the colonel considering adding 'suicidal tendencies' to his psych-evaluation) had nevertheless bought her mistress sufficient time to power up the office's own built-in defences. Their designers had spared no expense – the layered wards and thaumaturgical-alloy rods reinforcing the walls were designed to protect against anything short of a precision strike from a passing warship, and the electrified steel door had already claimed one victim – a particularly agile Hellhound whose signature forearm-blades had proven to be tragically conductive.

And then there were the turrets.

The brochure she had read upon taking up residence had had quite a lot to say about those – apparently, their employment by the office's architect had been a major selling-point with the Bureau. They were semi-sentient, essentially Intelligent Devices minus the wielders. As such, they had not only a sophisticated IFF system with several thousand permutations of TSAB uniforms and approved Barrier Jacket designs logged onto it, but also pin-point accuracy and a bewildering array of weapons systems both lethal and otherwise. The last included the magical pseudo-flamethrower, a solid-shot chaingun of questionable legality loaded with an infinite supply of armour-piercing rounds, and a targeted EMP burst modelled on technology recovered during the Scaglietti Incident that would absolutely ruin the day of any attacking cyborg or drone. It came as no surprise to her to see that the insane contraptions had been designed with the assistance of Chief Librarian Yuuno Scrya.

_Yuuno..._

They hadn't spoken much since the incident at the end of their trip to the parallel Earth. Quite understandable, really, given that both had extremely busy jobs with minimal overlap, though she couldn't help but feel that she'd been putting even less effort into attempting to talk to him than was entirely within the boundaries of the reasonable. Which was stupid, really. All she'd done was offer a bit of comfort to a friend in a tough situation – and not even that much, either. She'd done more for all of the Wolkenritter... well, minus the cheek-pecking, except the occasional maternal one to Vita, but the analogy still stood. She was getting flustered over absolutely nothing.

_And if you believe that, girl, then I've got a lovely little investment project in the outer colonies for you._

She shook her head, attempting vainly to clear it.

_Sorry, but have you forgotten who you're thinking about here? Yuuno. As in, Yuuno Scrya. Mentor, surrogate-brother-figure, and head-over-heels in love with one of your best friends since pretty much day one. Remind me, what does the TSAB field manual have to say about engaging in no-win situations again?_

These were reasonable arguments. Logical. She should have listened to them, and duly did so. After all, she was a military commander, not some clueless teenager. It wasn't exactly _easy_, though. She still remembered the feel of his skin, rough under her lips. He hadn't shaved that evening.

A voice intruded on her thoughts, and she almost collapsed in relief.

"This is Dr. Solara Kamri of the Deep Space Surveillance department to Colonel Yagami. Testing, 1 2 3... testing, 1 2 3. Come in, Colonel Yagami."

"Reading you loud and clear, Doctor," she said, switching one of the desk's holograms to show the scientist's perpetually-harried face. "Did it work, then?"

"So far," he replied. "Kaiser's balls, but it's good to hear a friendly voice on this thing. We've only just started to clear out the channels, but we thought you should be amongst the first to know, seeing as your lot were kind enough to help us out. I swear, that Guardian Beast of yours has been a real lifesaver – literally, in fact. They hit us again just as his squad arrived, and they chewed right through them. Never seen anything like it."

Hayate grinned. "Zafira may not be the most versatile soul, but what he does, he does well. Glad to hear you're safe. I'd probably best start restoring order, but before I go, I'd like to ask you another favour, if that's all right."

"Not a problem, ma'am. What do you need?"

"Well, I realise that it isn't exactly your speciality, but could you please see if you can tighten the focus of some of your scanners and run a few sweeps of the station? I think it could prove useful."

"Check for the location of those dimensional disturbances the bad guys are so fond of? Good idea, ma'am. You're right, it isn't what our stuff's meant to do, and what help we can offer is limited, but I'm sure we can come up with something. On the plus side, we've got the Warped Mirror fired up – turns out killer cyborgs work just as well as blowfish."

"Excuse me?"

"You _really_ don't want to know, ma'am. Anyway, we'll let you know as soon as we find something. Kamri out."

His face vanished from the screen, and Hayate tapped into the main network, feeling it slowly open up like a gargantuan, virtual flower. She opened all the available channels she could, listening to reports, issuing orders, and adding more and more information to her map. Another mental tier was focused on attempting to recall her training in space-station boarding actions, whilst the last kept tabs on the evolving organisational structure of those forces she could reach. It soon became apparent that she was the highest-ranking officer alive in this particular section of the central office – clearly, there had been a ruthlessly efficient method to the invaders' madness.

"Sergeant Lanos, you've got a big group of daemons headed your way. Try to hold them off as long as you can – I can't promise reinforcements, but I'll see if I can find you an exit solution. No stupid risks, all right?"

"They're going after the power plant on Deck Seventeen, Lieutenant. Get your platoon over to the rec-room junction – you should be able to cut them off with time to spare."

"Almera, DSS is picking up some weird energy readings from the med-bay near your position. Send a couple of your invisibles to check it out, but under no circumstances engage. I'm sending Corporal Mbeki's heavies to do the muscle-work – share any intel you gather with them, is that understood?"

"Another portal in Accounting? Thanks, Major. I'll chalk it up."

She felt a glorious, visceral thrill surge through her. Finally, she was out of the darkness and back in control, and whatever the outcome, she had a chance to make a difference. Even if she couldn't use her magic in this environment, her mind and her training were quite intact, and she intended to use them to their fullest extent.

Scrolling down the list, she saw a new channel pop up – a very familiar one.

"Corporal Lanster, this is Colonel Yagami. What's your situation?"

"Colonel! You're back!" The irritable young NCO sounded positively delighted – for a moment, at least. "It's not good, ma'am – they're all over the crew quarters, and we only just managed to evacuate the hubwards block. The other's a lost cause. Too many of those freaks in the way, and there's only about half a dozen of us able-bodied. Sorry, ma'am."

Something cold and heavy settled in Hayate's stomach. The spirewards block had been where Erio and Caro had been berthed. If it had been overrun... _no, they're all right. They have to be. They're tough kids. They've survived worse than this. Right?_

"Not your fault, Teana. A full evac from a surprise assault? You've done good. Head to the infirmary – sounds like you've got injured, and we need more combat mages over there anyway. As soon as we have the manpower, we'll take back those quarters. That's a promise."

Teana saluted the screen and turned away. "All right – you heard the lady. Lock, load, and move out in five. Subaru, see if you can help out the wounded. I'll scout out ahead."

Hayate cut the link, satisfied that the evacuees could handle themselves. _Think I'll have to keep an eye on young Corporal Lanster – that girl's showing some serious leadership potential, and it's hardly the first time. Another promotion might be advisable if we all get out of this alive._

_If._

She remembered a pair of laughing children, deliriously happy at being placed under the command of the famous Lieutenant-Colonel Yagami. Their adoptive mother had been so very proud that day, watching them get their forward mages' wings with a smile that had threatened to split her ordinarily grave face in half. Without thinking twice, Hayate moved liberating the crew quarters several places up her mental list of priorities. They were Fate's kids. That was all there was to it.

In the meantime, though, she had other things to deal with. Double-checking the available intelligence, she opened Fate and Nanoha's comm-channels.

_Time to go on the offensive._

_offensive._

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Because I figured Zafira deserved his time to shine as well.

I can definitely see the Bureau military having a serious re-think of their stance regarding firearms in the aftermath of the Scaglietti Incident. Not enough to relax Mid-Childa's exceptionally strict civilian gun-control laws by any standards, but enough for them to start seeing a bit of use in combat, especially in space battles where just about everything's lethal anyway. After all, it's hard to imagine how non-magical solid-shot weaponry could be much worse than something like Signum's Sturm Falke attack, which, lest we forget, involves impaling the enemy with a metre-long arrow which then explodes, sending shrapnel (and bits of the aforementioned enemy) all over the place. I mean, that's just _unfair_.


	23. Gone in Three Hundred Seconds

**22. Gone in Three Hundred Seconds**

Fate was not in the best of situations. She and Nanoha had been heading towards Hayate's office, attempting to rescue their vulnerable friend and put their collective heads together to form some sort of defence strategy. Unfortunately, they had decided to take the maintenance corridors running through the station as a shortcut, hoping to circumvent the main assault, and in the process discovered that the invaders had had exactly the same idea.

Half a dozen Hellhounds and over a hundred daemons later, Nanoha was nowhere to be seen and Fate, cursing the central office's eternity of identical-looking passageways, was hopelessly lost. She wasn't terribly worried about her partner – if the resurrected Sankt Kaiser and an army of war robots weren't enough to stop her, then a bunch of horror-movie rejects were not likely to present much of a problem – but Nanoha's navigational magic would certainly have come in useful around now.

"Incoming call," Bardiche reported, and projected a holographic screen in front of her. Hayate was on the other end, looking about as calm, happy, and relaxed as one might expect given that monsters were rampaging through her workplace – which was to say, not very. A moment later, a second screen appeared, this time showing Nanoha's face. Though she wasn't aware of the purpose of the call, Fate was absurdly pleased to see both of them.

"Captain Testarossa-Harlaown reporting in," she said, attempting to retain her professionalism. "What are your orders, colonel?"

Nanoha giggled, and even Hayate cracked a smile.

"Captain Takamachi," the latter said sternly, "did you not receive my request that you attempt to remove the stick from your colleague's posterior?"

"Sorry, ma'am – I evaluated the situation, and deduced that it was well outside my operational capabilities. Should I call in reinforcements to assist?"

Fate rolled her eyes. "Are you two _quite_ finished?"

Hayate laughed, but it didn't reach her eyes. "My apologies, Fate – with all that's going on, I thought I needed a little levity. Besides, you just make it _so_ easy. I've got a mission for you – for both of you, in fact. Hence the conference call. Things are going well – as you can tell, we've re-established communications, and I think we're starting to push them back. There's a problem, though."

"There always is," Fate commented with resigned amusement.

"Tell me about it. Anyway, we have two big energy spikes near your respective positions – one in our main security centre, and the other in the Deck Five observatory."

"The observatory?" Fate asked, surprised. "That's not very close... to... the... oh, _no_. Look, there were the daemons... and all the fighting... and would it have _killed_ them to put some signposts up on the junctions? Don't you dare say anything. _Either_ of you."

"It's all right, Fate," Nanoha said innocently. "I'm sure nobody expected someone from Interstellar Navigation to have a sense of direction."

"Are you going to get back to discussing the mission, or am I going to have to mention those times when you were behaving in a manner _very_ unexpected of a combat instructor?"

Her partner went bright red, and Hayate looked rather intrigued. "_You kept the photos_? Right. Ahem. Mission. Yes. Hayate, what can you tell us about the spikes?"

"Well, yours seems to be a reasonably powerful mage – double-A minimum, and likely packing a few other nasty tricks as well, knowing the enemy. They probably caused the failure of our security systems, and the fact that they haven't moved since implies that they are attempting to turn said systems against us. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how much of a problem _that_ could cause."

"No, you most certainly don't. How much time do I have?"

"Some, but not much. I had Rein take a look at the relevant magical architecture, and the operative – whoever they are – is moving fast, almost like they have inside knowledge. What they've uploaded so far is worrying enough; I wouldn't like to give them too much more opportunity."

"A traitor?" Fate asked.

"Unlikely. All the mages of that ability in our vicinity are accounted for one way or another, and there weren't many of us to begin with. I would be interested to know how they're doing it, though; any intelligence we can gain on the enemy is worth its weight in the precious metal of your choosing. One last thing – quite a bit of the equipment in that centre is very expensive and difficult to replace. Try not to do your usual thing in there."

"Move fast, take them alive, and don't wreck the machinery. I can do that. Nanoha out."

Just before turning it off, she touched the holographic screen lightly, and Fate did the same, their illusionary fingers passing through each other. Without the proximity required for their traditional pre-mission hand-squeeze, it was the next best thing.

"What about my objective?" the remaining captain asked.

"It's the bigger of the two – a fixed dimensional disturbance rather than a living entity that emits a high-amplitude pulse every five minutes. Judging by its location, which has no strategic or tactical advantage beyond being a large, open space, and by its readings, which match those of similar phenomena we've found throughout the spire, it appears to be one of the gates through which they're summoning daemonic reinforcements. The pulses, therefore, would be waves of troops passing through."

"Sounds like it's employing a spell – I can deal with that. If possible, I'll need a floor-plan and a timer for the pulses."

"Not a problem. Downloading them to Bardiche... _now_. Incidentally, are you ever going to tell me about those photographs?"

Fate smiled. "Those? I deleted them months ago. As if I'd give them to you anyway, you dirty old woman."

Hayate shrugged. "Thought you'd say that. Couldn't hurt to ask, though. Good hunting, Fate, and let me know when you're done."

"Will do, Hayate. Keep an eye on Nanoha, won't you? We both know she pushes herself too hard sometimes."

"Of course." There was a flash of concern in the colonel's eyes, she saw. _Is she hiding something?_

The link died, and Fate ran forward, overlaying the map and the timer across her vision. _The next pulse should happen about... now._

There was a distant howl and she accelerated, armoured boots clanging against the metal flooring. _Left... right... right... left._ She skidded around the last corner, the map orienting itself to the direction she was facing, and blasted the rapidly-approaching door off its tracks with a quick bolt of magic, not even bothering to use her Device.

Beyond was a wide, spacious hallway that traced along the inside of the station's hull. Rows of massive windows looked out on the jumbled, anarchic grey-white contours of the central office and the gently swirling dimensional sea beyond. Benches lined one side of the hall, presumably to allow bored personnel to sit back and admire the view, and the dark, bulbous mass of the observatory was dimly visible in the distance.

Or, at least, it would have been if the space had not been filled wall-to-wall with daemons, moving toward the combat mage's position like a swarm of locusts. A few of them noticed her, raising a vicious-looking assortment of exotic weaponry as they prepared to engage.

Fate was faster, though.

"Photon Lancer."

An array of yellow spheres formed around her, smacking into the advancing enemy with a string of small explosions. They didn't do much beyond slowing the daemons down and disrupting their charge, but then, Fate hadn't expected them to.

"Riot Blade," Bardiche announced, and folded outwards into a spindly T-shape. A huge blade of the same yellow energy shot from it, forming a bulky, single-edged sword somewhere between a broadsword and a cutlass.

"Overdrive," Fate whispered, her voice barely audible even by herself over the daemons' clamour. "True Sonic Form."

Light flared outwards, and the outer layers of her Barrier Jacket vanished, leaving her in what was essentially a functional black leotard with extras. Inwardly, she winced. This outfit might grant her unmatched speed, but it always left her feeling so... _exposed_. Not something you really wanted to be when you had a daemonic horde within spitting distance – especially when you knew exactly the sort of damage their saliva could do to solid metal, let alone flesh.

"Riot Zanber," her Intelligent Device responded, and she lifted her new sword, pulling it apart lengthwise. The end result was two of the same, connected by a ribbon of the same energy that comprised their blades. Funnily enough, this did not reduce their size – each was still about as big as she was. She twirled them experimentally, smiled a grim smile, and shot forward like a small, black-clad comet, a yellowish coma trailing around and behind her.

The swords, as with most products of Mid-type fighting styles, were non-lethal. Aside from the occasional rumour of some inventively nasty Ancient Belkan spell (and the fallen civilisation had been _good_ at inventively nasty), it was a universally-accepted fact that you couldn't kill a living creature with a direct magical attack. Even building-levelling bombardment spells would only render those humans caught in their blast radius unconscious, which was why Ancient and Modern Belkan fighting styles, which relied on magically-augmented physical weaponry, were still so popular and dangerous. Fate's swords were designed to subdue particularly difficult foes, cutting through armour and sending whoever happened to be inside into the sort of 'sleep' from which they wouldn't wake up until they were safe and secure inside a TSAB holding cell with a raging headache.

That didn't stop them from being absolutely devastating against the daemons, though.

Unnatural monstrosities unravelled, exploded and/or simply vanished left, right and centre as she carved through their ranks, moving too fast for them to track, let alone land a blow on. She jinked madly from side to side, sometimes flying, sometimes running on the walls and ceiling, sometimes using the odd unfortunate daemon as a stepping-stone... whatever presented the path of least resistance.

A Hellhound rushed her, its helmet-gun firing, and she scissored her blades together, crushing its shield. It popped out from between them like a cork, quite thoroughly subdued, and she moved on, dropping a quick bind on it as she passed.

_Four minutes._

She pirouetted, energy-swords extended, and cleared a space. The door to the observatory structure was scant metres away – or what was left of it, anyway. There was simply a ragged, blackened hole in the wall now, presumably the result of a Hellhound's grenades.

"Photon Lancer, Phalanx Shift."

More spheres this time – many more. They flew into the opening, briefly illuminating the darkness beyond. After a moment, Fate followed suit.

The TSAB central office was not just a military base or an administrative headquarters. It was a small city, home to over twenty thousand personnel at any one time, and most of those people needed something to do in their spare time. As a result, a fair number of clubs and societies had sprung up, dedicated to activities both commonplace and obscure. One of the smaller ones was the Ship-Watching Association, a small, furtive group who took inordinate delight in observing the hundreds of spacecraft that swarmed eternally around the vast space station.

They had taken over the Deck Five observatory within weeks of its opening, seeing in it a private haven in which they could relax, practice their hobby, and discuss pertinent topics ranging from ship manufacturers to esoteric skin conditions. The place Fate now found herself in was a clubroom of sorts, piled high with astronomy gear, mismatched tables, and even an Arcturan Megachess set. She'd been here before, mostly to drag some absentee technician or another back to Navigation.

This time, though, things were different.

None of the lights were on; in fact, the invaders had even gone so far as to smash any electronic or magical installations – the vending machines, for instance – that might emit some sort of glow. The only illumination came from the ruined doorway Fate had just come through, revealing little more than a tangle of disconcerting shadows. For a moment, all was still and silent... and then the shooting started again.

The violet muzzle-flares and carmine energy blasts were almost blinding against the darkness, but at least they provided some means by which she could orient herself. Metal spheres tumbled through the gloom, gleaming dully, and she hurled herself to one side, lifting off the ground and piling on the acceleration.

"Defenser!" Bardiche yelled, and a weak, flickering shield formed behind her just as the grenades detonated. It shattered, of course, as the shrapnel hit it, but she was well out of the lethal radius by then, and none of the cartwheeling metal shards reached her. A gust of hot air washed over her legs and she looked around, attempting to draw a bead on some sort of target. The darkness pressed in, kept at bay only by the steady glow of her energy blades.

It was then that she realised she'd gone right into a trap.

A curtain of fire shot across her path as the Hellhounds let rip with all their weaponry at once. Desperately, she tried to evade, but her own speed and momentum conspired against her, sending her hurtling straight into the thick of it. The grenades hadn't been intended to kill her, she realised – just to drive her out into the open.

There was no room to evade – the volume of fire was too intense. All she could do was use her feeble shields and the flats of her swords to deflect as much as she could. A crystal scraped across her upper left arm and she gasped in agony, falling to the ground. The pain was quite disproportionate to the size of the injury, as if the limb had been somehow dipped in hot lead. Her Device tumbled from her nerveless fingers, its glowing blades chewing into the floor.

She hit the carpet rolling, keeping her injured arm tucked in close and extending the other. Bardiche leapt into her open hand, reshaping itself as it went. She was relieved to see that it had had the good sense to return to its staff-form; useful as they were, the pair of enormous yellow swords were effectively a giant 'SHOOT ME!' poster in her current environment. _Your weapon's showing better judgment than you are, Fate. Not a good sign._

Though rounds from the Hellhounds' splinter pistols still buzzed past, none came as close. Thanks to the clubroom's general untidiness, the cyborgs only knew her general location now, and no matter how exotic the design of the gun or how fancy the wielder's augmetics, there really wasn't a way to make solid-shot weaponry firing on full auto particularly accurate. It was one of the many reasons the Bureau employed combat mages.

_Three minutes._

She took cover behind an overturned table, propping her staff against one of the legs and examining her injury. Though there wasn't much light to see by, and creating more was likely a terminally bad idea, she was pretty sure that her arm wasn't supposed to have a network of black-veined corruption spreading across it. Worse, she had no talent in healing magic with which to excise the poison. She undid one of her hair-ribbons, tying the supernaturally-tough material into a makeshift tourniquet and resolving to get it looked at by a professional as soon as possible.

In the meantime, she had bigger problems.

The daemon horde had turned around and were moving back the way they had come, advancing with a direct, murderous intent that suggested the darkness and clutter had absolutely no effect on their ability to detect her. She could see them clearly as well through the debris of the clubroom. It wasn't a matter of illumination; there was just something about them that caught the eye, their otherworldly forms standing out against the background of the real world.

Grabbing a bunch of cartridges from her bandoliers, she attempted to load Bardiche one-handed, which turned out to be a slow, frustrating process even with the Device's assistance. It didn't help that she was left-handed, either. The daemons came closer and closer, and soon projectiles were raining down worryingly close to her position. Alerted to her location, the Hellhounds joined in as well, crystalline splinters punching through the table.

The staff's cylinder snapped shut, and she held it in the crook of her useless arm, summoning a shield to ward off the incoming fire. Breathing in deeply, she extended the flat of her palm towards the daemons.

"Trident Smasher."

Energy gathered in her hand, enhanced by the magical cartridges. She released it and it forked out into three huge parallel beams, searing through the daemons, the furniture, and anything else in their path. They exited the doorway, inhuman howls indicating that they had found more prey outside.

No sooner had the triple blast left her fingers than Fate ducked and ran, keeping her body low to the ground. Moments later, there was a flash of reddish-purple light as the table she'd been using as a shelter was obliterated by the Hellhounds' magic.

_Two minutes._

The next piece of cover was a haphazard pile of overflowing supply crates, which at least had the advantage of being bulkier than the last one. She began another awkward reload, trying to figure out a strategy as she did so. _They're too coordinated at the moment. If I attack them directly, I'll be torn to shreds. I need to find a way to disrupt them._

She closed her eyes, feeling her consciousness drift outwards. It was a trick she hadn't always been very good at, mostly leaving it to Arf during her days as her mother's instrument, but the thirteen years she'd spent with the TSAB in general and Nanoha in particular had amended that quite thoroughly.

There was a great deal of interference, both from the assembled daemons and from some dark, unknown presence in the main viewing chamber beyond, but Fate could still detect the signatures of four moderately powerful mages. _The cyborgs, I presume._ Two were moving towards her position, their augmented senses serving them well, while the remaining pair stayed back to provide covering fire. She took careful note of their positions and vectors, marking them on her map of the room. Eyes still closed, she raised her staff, pointing it towards the ceiling.

"Plasma Lancer."

Eight yellow charging rings appeared to her sides, enormous arrowhead-shaped projectiles emerging from them a second later. They arced over the crates in pairs, homing in on the Hellhounds like living, predatory creatures. By the time she heard the explosions, the Bureau captain was already moving.

The first Hellhound was less than ten metres from her position, still reeling from the impacts. Bardiche had switched back to its Riot Zanber form, the single-bladed version comprising a double-tipped broadsword twice as long as she was tall. She swung it in a clumsy, one-handed slash, knocking the cyborg back into a still-sparking drinks machine.

The second was more lucid, meeting her charge with a blast of magic followed by a barrage of frenzied slashes with its forearm-blades. She parried the bolt, stepping smoothly to one side to avoid her opponent's weapons. One of the cuts managed to reach her sword, chopping the plane of yellow energy in half, but the Hellhound was still slowed by her previous spell and she managed to get behind it, repairing her weapon with a jolt of willpower and jabbing it towards its back.

The cyborg's neck was caught between the sword's forked tips, the bio-enhancements she had been given by her mother letting her lift it off the ground with ease. A flick of her wrist sent it flying into the crate-pile, only for it to become the subject of a heavy-duty bind as soon as it landed. From the combat logs she had received so far, Fate knew that there was no such thing as overkill for these creatures.

_One minute._

The remaining Hellhounds opened fire, but with two of them down, they couldn't muster a proper suppression. There was just too much clutter, and Fate was just too fast. All it did was keep them visible. She closed the distance, weaving in and out of their line of sight, her fragile shields protecting her from the few stray rounds that came too close for comfort.

She held Bardiche out to one side, the massive sword as light as a feather. _I hope the Ship-Watching Association won't make me pay for this..._

"Jet Zanber."

The blade tripled in length, punching through everything in its way. She swept it in front of her in a lazy arc, creating a deceptively quick wave of destruction. Vending machines exploded, tables shattered, and the megachess set fell apart, its four tiers cut neatly in two.

She lowered the sword, letting it return to its normal length, and moved towards the door to the main viewing chamber, skimming over the field of wreckage she had created. Motion from the pile of debris caught her eye, and she threw a quick Photon Lancer towards it. A few more magical explosions, and the half-buried Hellhound ceased its feeble struggles. Whether it had been knocked out or simply received the message she wasn't sure, and she certainly didn't have time to check.

Her loose hair whipped around her and she shook her head, trying to make sure it didn't get caught in anything. She knew it was a liability in combat, and she'd always intended to get it cut someday, but had never quite had the heart to. Nanoha considered it one of her best features, after all. She smiled. _I give that girl far too much leeway sometimes._

The viewing chamber door had suffered much the same treatment as the one to the clubroom, which was entirely to her advantage. She sped through the opening without even slightly slowing down, glancing left and right to take in her surroundings.

The chamber was lighter than the clubroom by some margin. The lights were still off, but the hemispherical bubble of windows that comprised the roof and ceiling provided a fair measure of illumination to compensate. Ever-shifting patterns of green and purple played across the room, outlining its grisly contents.

Four bodies were arranged around the chamber's centre, connected by a network of runes engraved in the floor. Each had died in a different way – one had been savagely hacked to pieces, one was mutated beyond physical tolerance and even description, another seemed to have been hit by several dozen different fatal and disfiguring diseases at once, and the last had no obvious injuries, though his face was distorted into an expression of desperate, agonised pleasure that chilled her soul.

All of them wore the tattered remains of TSAB uniforms, and she recognised at least two of them from her previous visits to the club. _Were they having a meeting during the attack_? She imagined bodies strewn, invisible, across the battleground that the clubroom had become, mangled irreparably by the fight between her and the invaders, and immediately wished that she hadn't.

Floating above the gruesome arrangement was the gateway, an irregular, vaguely circular portal that seemed to draw in the remaining light of the room, the brightly swirling colours in its centre not reaching even an inch outside. Like the daemons it summoned, it seemed superimposed on reality, hurting her eyes if she looked at it too long.

"Hurricane Thunderclap!"

She swiped the air with her Device as she approached, working out the abused muscles in her right arm as her left flopped behind her, useless as ever. The pain was extraordinary, but this was a distant fact, dulled out by the adrenaline that surged through her. Indigo lightning ran across the blade as she charged her attack, combining dispel and assault magic with flawless precision. Behind her, the remaining daemons from outside entered the chamber, moving cautiously.

_Count zero. Time's up._

The gate bulged outwards, strange, amorphous forms appearing in its depths and resolving themselves into the familiar shapes of daemons. They poured outwards, a seething tide of madness and hate... and Fate struck.

The first blow was a horizontal slash, lightning arcing off it and burying itself in daemonic flesh. The portal buckled and the daemons recoiled, but she wasn't done yet.

"Sprite Zanber," Bardiche said quietly, a faint ripple of anger in its mechanical voice. Clearly, it hadn't been too pleased about seeing the sacrifices either.

She raised the sword high, its two tips almost scraping the ceiling, and brought it down in a mighty sweep, wincing at the fresh surge of pain from her injury. The gate shattered like glass, creating an explosion that cratered the floor and engulfed the poor, abused ship-watchers, searing them away into nothing. _Nice to know that even supernatural pyrotechnics have some sense of mercy._

An invisible weight lifted from her shoulders as the Warp-powered spell dissipated, the lights in the room flickering weakly to life. Every daemon in the chamber disintegrated at once, pulled back screeching into the void from which they'd come.

"Hayate, this is Fate. I've eliminated the objective."

"My word, Fate, that was fast. I'm getting reports of something strange occurring with the daemons – anything to do with you?"

"Might be – all the ones over here vanished as soon as I destroyed the gate."

"Ah? Interesting. That certainly corroborates what I've heard so far – we didn't get all of them by any means, but now we know their weakness, and this banishment alone opened up several avenues of attack. Speaking of, I'd like you to report to the infirmary. We're assembling a strike-force there to take back the spirewards quarters, and having an S-ranked mage at the speartip would make things a whole lot easier."

_Wait, which one were Erio and Caro in again? Ugh – I _knew_ I should have checked the crew rosters one more time this morning._ "Of course, Hayate. I may need some medical assistance first – one of the cyborgs shot me in the arm, and I _really_ don't like the colour it's turning."

"The wound?"

"The _arm_."

"Ah. Right. Sounds like a spot of healing would definitely be a good idea. I'll let Shamal know you're coming, then. Will you be needing another map to get back?"

"Yes please. Oh, and don't let Nanoha hear about this, will you? It'll clean up with a bit of magic, certainly, but if she hears about it, she'll be worried sick. You know how she is."

Hayate smiled. "I know how _both_ of you are. Don't worry, your secret's safe with me."

"Thanks, Hayate. Knew I could trust you. Captain Testarossa-Harlaown out."

She set off in the general direction of the headquarters, investing the remainder of her willpower in raw speed. _Nanoha... I wonder how she's doing at the moment?_

**

* * *

**

**Author's Notes:** (insert awesome piece of music by Nana Mizuki here).

From the bits of it seen in the series proper, I can imagine the TSAB central office being _really_ difficult to navigate. Accident or design? Who knows?


	24. Entrances and Exits

**23. Entrances and Exits**

"Strike Flame."

Raising Heart's oversized, spear-like head slid apart, a stiletto-like magical bayonet protruding from its tip. Nanoha rammed it into the last of the daemons and straightened up, brushing spattered ichor off her Barrier Jacket.

The central office's communications network had been expanding ever since Sergeant Picanto and the DSS team had re-established it, incorporating more and more Bureau personnel. Observations, combat logs, and other nuggets of information had been traded back and forth with chaotic intensity, the various mages' Devices uploading them to their owners' brains with the speed of thought, and the process had only accelerated once Yuuno and the Infinite Library's staff got in on the action.

The captain now knew, for instance, that the daemons were of a variant of magical construct capable of existing in realspace only by summoning physical bodies. Magic could disrupt magic, and so constructs were one of the few kinds of living beings that it could reliably inflict serious injuries on – except in cases like this. Destroying said bodies would instead break their grip on reality, banishing them back to dimensional space (or the Warp, as their masters called it) until they had sufficient time to recuperate... which all sounded rather neat and tidy, really.

None of Yuuno's texts had mentioned that quite so much _gunk_ was involved. Presumably, it was the remnants of the material forms they'd abandoned. She idly wondered if she should add that to the books in question, perhaps with an enquiry as to how to wash the stuff off white cloth.

"Raising Heart, commence Wide Area Search."

A cluster of pink spheres appeared from around her hand, floating unhurriedly along the corridor before peeling off in a variety of directions once they reached the junction at the end. She waited a while, letting the spell's findings filter back to her gradually, before opening a channel to her commander.

_Hayate, I think I'm close to my target._

_You're talking about more than just the map co-ordinates, aren't you?_ Nanoha wasn't surprised at her friend's perceptiveness. They'd been working together for over a decade, after all.

_Yep. According to my scan, they're throwing everything they've got at me. Bit of an indicator._

_Understood. I'll update my calculations. Really wish I could get you some backup, but we're overstretched as it is here. Good luck, Nanoha._

_Don't worry, I understand. You too._

With that, she drew in her will and prepared for battle.

Given the peculiarities of the Bureau's hiring practices, it was not an uncommon assumption that their military branch's celebrated Ace of Aces was the owner of any number of exotic assets. Cybernetics, bio-enhancements, lethal Ancient Belkan artefacts... the list went on. Even those who had actually _met_ her had difficulty believing that an ordinary human had risen to a position of such prominence. Several of her higher-profile victims insisted point-blank that she was some sort of incarnate demon, and she'd never quite had the heart to tell them otherwise.

The truth was, Nanoha had none of these advantages. Her victories were the result of the far less glamorous virtues of hard work, discipline, and iron determination. Also firepower. Lots and lots of firepower.

"Axel Shooter."

A dozen streamers of magic fanned out from her staff's collar and sped down the corridor, followed shortly afterward by another wave of the same. Inhuman voices cried out in pain, shockingly close – clearly, the daemons had finally figured out how to close on their prey silently. _Masking themselves from magical surveillance might have been more useful,_ she noted wryly, _but at least they're making progress._

As she continued the bombardment, sending wave after wave of projectiles towards the unseen enemy, Nanoha re-checked the readings from her scan. She was in the expeditionary force's small accounting section, less than a hundred metres from the security centre. There were six Bureau IFF signals emanating from the offices on either side, presumably belonging to administrative staff trapped by the attack. The captain made a mental note to check up on them once the coast was clear – the fact that they weren't responding to telepathy certainly wasn't a good sign – but she rather doubted that she would have the opportunity for a while yet. The approaching daemons were proving rather more durable than past experience had indicated, and she had absolutely no idea why.

A moment later they entered her line of sight, and she received her answer.

Four Hellhounds ran ahead of the swarm, their shields interlocking into a single barrier that deflected her attacks quite ably. That wasn't the bad news, though. The _bad_ news was that none of them registered to any of her supernatural senses. Shadows wrapped around them, the occasional errant rune betraying their magical origin.

_Oh, I just _had _to go ahead and think it, didn't I? Best nip this nonsense in the bud before more of them get the same idea._

"Blaster System Limit One... release!"

"Blaster set," Raising Heart acknowledged, and the streamers of energy brightened and expanded, slamming into the cyborgs' shields with renewed force.

An unpleasant tingling sensation crept up Nanoha's arms and she winced. Her Device's custom Blaster System supercharged her magic, but wreaked havoc on her body's integrity in the process. The trick was to defeat one's enemy before one suffered permanent damage. Fortunately, she seemed to be having some success in that regard. The Hellhounds' defences were crumbling and flaking away and she intensified her assault, investing more and more energy in the spell.

It was then that she noticed the _other_ energy readings in the corridor. Four small electronic devices had been placed on the office doors flanking her, and it didn't take a genius to figure out what they were. _Time for a change of tactics._

She loaded another clip of cartridges, cancelling the bombardment as she did so. The projectiles vanished abruptly, and the enemy surged towards her. A sextet of glowing pink wings unfolded from Raising Heart's head, and a massive charging ring appeared around its owner's feet.

"Excelion Buster, A.C.S. Drive!"

Nanoha launched herself forwards, just as the breaching charges detonated behinds her The closest two doors slammed together like a steel trap scant inches from her armour-clad feet, and the cloud of smoke formed streamers around her desperate rush.

The Hellhounds, sensibly, tried to flee, but the press of their inhuman allies behind them meant they had little success. Raising Heart's blade struck the centremost one mid-leap, chewing through its wards with grim inevitability. No sooner had its tip penetrated the cyborg's defences than Nanoha began the second stage of her attack.

"Break... shoot!"

A sphere of energy emerged from her Device's head, growing rapidly and then collapsing into a beam of concentrated magic... right in the unfortunate Hellhound's face. The resultant explosion tore the daemons' formation apart, sending the survivors cartwheeling out of the way and blocking their reinforcements' aim. She launched another Axel Shooter wave, the projectiles whipping around her in a manner that strongly discouraged either daemon or cyborg from getting too close. She turned around, intending to scope out whoever had placed the charges... and received her third nasty surprise of the battle.

Six Hellhounds stood in the corridor, still as statues and swathed in the same darkness as their comrades. Each one held one of the administrative staff, a blade pressed to their throat. Assuming a hostage situation, Nanoha lowered her weapon, realising too late that it was exactly what the creatures had been waiting for.

In unison, they sliced downwards with their blades, opening their prisoners from neck to groin, and stepped backwards, chanting in their harsh, mechanical voices. There was a horrible, organic sound, and the victims split apart, their bodies reshaping into fleshy gateways with portals to the Warp at their centre. Through it all they screamed, their voices barely human and their faces horribly distorted, and Nanoha knew that they understood everything that was happening to them. Daemons climbed out from within, howling their battle-cries, and the Hellhounds' chanting continued, refining their living gates yet further.

Nanoha could only stand there, open-mouthed, her mind simply refusing to accept the nightmare unfolding before her eyes. Then her training kicked in, and she raised her staff once more.

"Excelion Buster!"

The massive beam seared down the corridor, carrying all of her rage and all of her horror with it. The sacrifices fell apart, the loss of the dark magic sustaining them ensuring that they were dead before they hit the ground, and she knew it had been a mercy. Bile rose in the back of her throat, but she sternly kept it down, knowing the fight wasn't over yet.

The horde crowded around her, taking advantage of the distraction. Though she'd taken care of the Hellhound reinforcements, that still left a lot of enemies uncomfortably close. She fell back into her accustomed routine, dispatching foes left and right with staff, bayonet, and spells, but she knew it wasn't enough. Every time she tried to raise a shield, a Hellhound was there to cut through it. Every time she tried to dodge, the mass of daemons hemmed her in.

A phase blade sliced through the back of her skirt, almost hamstringing her, and she leapt forwards, only for one of the incorporeal hawk-daemons to rake her across the face with its claws, causing her to jerk back with a short gasp of pain. It didn't hit anything vital, fortunately, but head wounds were always bleeders, and the last thing she needed right now was for her vision to be obscured.

_Besides, I might not be so lucky with the next one._

She lashed out with the Axel Shooter tendrils, buying her enough time to take a deep breath as she prepared to unleash the highest-level magic she could muster at short notice. All her cartridges had been expended, and she didn't have time to reload, which meant that she'd be drawing entirely from her own stores. With Blaster Mode activated, there were even odds of it ending up as a suicide attack – worse, if one considered that she was in an environment as inherently cramped, fragile, and hazardous as a space station. Still, it was the only chance of survival she had.

"Excelion-"

There was a rather anticlimactic _pop_, and every daemon in the corridor vanished, leaving Nanoha and the three remaining Hellhounds to stare at each other in bewilderment.

_Hayate, what on earth just happened? Where did they all go?_

The colonel's voice had a note of unmistakeable smugness to it. _Fate happened. Incidentally, would you mind closing any summoning gates you come across on your way to your objective? Seems to be rather helpful._

_Ugh – I hope I never see another again. I'll send you the combat log once I'm done – it's not pretty, but you need to see it. They're learning, Hayate. They're learning and- whoa!_

The Hellhounds had regained their wits, their helmet-guns spitting and their dull grey blades carving the air. She danced away, summoning another wave of streamers to batter her assailants, but the cyborgs were ready this time. Those projectiles that were not deflected by shields or dissipated by phase blades were simply dodged, and soon she was faced yet again with the unenviable prospect of facing weapons that could cut through absolutely _anything_ in close quarters – and the creatures they were attached to weren't too pleasant either.

_Well, here goes nothing..._

She targeted the central Hellhound once more (that was to say, the central one of the three still conscious – her original target was still slumped in the corner, drooling into his helmet), sweeping her leg out in a low, clumsy kick. It jumped over the attack easily, stabbing its blades downwards, and she summoned a shield to defend herself. It was a futile gesture, and both of them knew it – the swords could penetrate the magical barrier as would the proverbial heated cutlery through agitated bovine emulsion.

It was probably just as well, then, that Nanoha had absolutely no intention of letting the cyborg touch it.

"Barrier Burst!" she gasped, and the shield exploded, lifting her foe off its feet and hurling it back down the corridor. The other two were only hit by the periphery of the explosion, but that was still enough to stagger them for a moment, and that was all she needed.

She climbed awkwardly to her feet, Raising Heart's heads-up display painting her targets with glowing circles, and inserted another clip. _Not many left. Best make this one count._

"Blaster Two!"

A shockwave of excess energy pulsed out from her Device, denying the Hellhounds a chance to recover, and a pair of small, triangular drones materialised beside her, hovering just above shoulder-height.

"Divine Buster."

Three lances of pink energy seared across the corridor, one from Nanoha's staff and one from each of the drones. There was a series of thuds as the cyborgs' unconscious forms fell to the floor.

_Much better._

She took stock of her situation. Though she was relieved to note that the Blaster System had caused little more than some light-headedness and the odd twinge in her joints, the scratches on her face had performed as expected, sheening her face with blood and dripping down into her eyes. She wiped it off on the back of her sleeve, leaving a long red smear, and picked up the piece of her skirt that the Hellhound had cut off. After trimming it a bit with Raising Heart's bayonet, she tied it around her forehead, unconsciously mimicking her partner a few dozen rooms away, and set off for the security centre, uploading her combat log to the telepathic network as she did so.

The abbreviated skirt felt decidedly odd against her legs, but she decided not to repair it. The blade hadn't done enough damage to compromise the Barrier Jacket's defensive capabilities, and running out of magic halfway through a battle because she'd wasted some on fashion concerns would probably make her die of embarrassment before the enemy had a chance to get a shot in.

As she approached the centre, she thought of many things. She thought of her little family – Erio, Caro, Vivio, Fate – and offered a short prayer to whoever was listening for their safety. She thought of the gate her partner had destroyed. How many daemons had it banished? How easy would it be to replicate the feat with another? Above all, though, she tried _not_ to think of the men and women she had just seen die in front of her eyes. What if she had simply opened fire as soon as she saw them? Could she have saved them? Or would she just have gotten them killed anyway as their captors realised what was about to happen? The Hellhounds had never been slow, after all. _No way of knowing, now._

_Best ask Shamal for a memory-erasure when I get back. There's nothing about this particular experience that I want to keep, and everyone else will still have the logs._

The objective room's door was sealed, and even Hayate's codes weren't working, which implied a lot of possibilities – none of them good. Not wishing to risk the equipment inside, she employed the bayonet once more, cutting through the thick metal before administering a magic-infused kick to knock the whole affair down. She dived in, snapping her arm out at the centre's sole occupant.

"Chain Bind!"

Pink tendrils shot from the floor, wrapping themselves around him, and he snarled wordlessly, struggling like an animal caught in a trap. The tiny room's lights were out, but the sickly glow from the monitors and instrument panels lining the walls was more than enough to confirm his identity.

She recognised his face as belonging to Sergeant Ibrahim, one of the headquarters security detail she had appointed, but there was nothing of the placid, gentle soldier she had known in his eyes. Siddiq Ibrahim hadn't burned with magical power the way this creature did either, or moved in such a disturbingly boneless, liquid manner.

"Unknown infiltrator," she said calmly, "you are under arrest for assaulting Bureau personnel, sabotaging Bureau equipment, and impersonating a military officer. Please do not attempt to resist, or I will be forced to disable you."

"NO!" the creature shrieked, its facial features stretching grotesquely. "No, you don't understand, I can't let you do this! They're cornered without the gate! They're cornered, they're desperate, and they've got the children! You have to let me go! You have to let me stop them!"

"What children?" Nanoha demanded. "What are you talking about?"

Her captive slumped back in its restraints, shaking its head. "It doesn't matter now. It's too late, yes, far, far too late. All I can do is fulfil my mission. _To assume the shape of the accursed and deliver death from the purity within you_."

The creature collapsed inwards, its limbs retreating into its body, and slid out of the binds, writhing across the floor before assuming humanoid shape once again. Behind it, Ibrahim's clothes fell to the floor, but it no longer looked anything like him.

In his place was a woman in a skin-tight black bodysuit whose athletic curves and predatory grace Nanoha would have been able to appreciate a whole lot better if the creature hadn't immediately stabbed a horribly familiar-looking grey blade at her face. The fact that she was well over two metres away proved irrelevant, her arm stretching to an impossible length with nightmarish speed.

The TSAB captain dropped to the floor, taking aim with her staff. The phase blade passed overhead, stabbing into one of the monitors, and the Divine Assassin screamed as electricity coursed up her arm. She staggered back, her body twitching, bulging and writhing as if it wasn't entirely sure about the shape it had taken.

"I've heard a lot about you, Nanoha Takamachi." she said quietly, her voice changing pitch and tone with every ripple of motion. "The Bureau's top combat mage, the Ace of Aces, the White Devil. A fitting opponent, I think, for my last battle. Make it a good one, won't you?"

Nanoha's response was short and to the point. "Divine Buster!"

The beam should have hit – Nanoha knew it as surely as she knew Raising Heart's start-up incantation, or the smell of Fate's hair. Instead, the assassin bent around it, her torso stretching and contorting as a third arm shot upwards from her back, supporting her rubbery frame against the ceiling.

She giggled, the weird modulation from her body's shiftings only enhancing the edge of hysteria in the sound. "Please, do keep calling your attacks like that. It makes my job _so_ much easier."

Nanoha thought something extremely impolite. _Raising Heart, switch to telepathic activation._

_Yes, my master._

_Better. Axel Shooter!_

The streamers launched once more, her drones imitating her action, and soon the security centre was filled with homing projectiles. The assassin slid through them, tentacle-like limbs erupting from her body and attacking from all directions at once. There was very little way of telling whether one was tipped with a fist, a foot, or the deadly phase blade until it was too late, and after the first one to get through Nanoha's defences almost decapitated her, she had no intention of bothering to figure out which was which.

The fight developed into a maze of feint and counter-feint, attacks flickering back and forth with the speed of thought. The assassin seemed to be everywhere, unleashing a steady stream of punches, kicks, stabs, and the odd spot of magic, and the best Nanoha could do was funnel her in to a few angles of assault. It was only a matter of time before such an inherently unstable situation collapsed, and collapse it did.

With a gesture, Nanoha redirected all of her Axel Shooter tendrils into the security centre's ceiling, creating a forest of explosions around the Divine Assassin's feet. Her opponent elegantly flipped to the floor, but not before the combat mage had kicked the operator's chair in her direction. The assassin's legs wrapped round it like a garden hose encountering an errant lawnmower, and the moment of distracted confusion was all Nanoha needed.

She lunged forward with her bayonet, aiming for the assassin's centre of mass... and stumbled to one side, a wave of dizziness and nausea sweeping over her. The Blaster System's effects, combined with the added strain of using telepathy to trigger her attacks, had left her at the end of her physical tether, and now she was paying for it in full.

Two of the assassin's arms shot out, surrounded by ominous reddish-purple charging rings, and she knew she would not evade in time.

"Doom Bolt!"

It was like being punched by a thousand fists at once, the brevity of the attack in no way diminishing the feeling of utter relentlessness. The wind was knocked from her and she flew backwards, slamming the back of her head against an instrument panel in the process and feeling something give way inside her chest. Lights and colours danced in front of her eyes as she slid down the wall, only barely managing to land on her own two feet.

The assassin was upright again, looping her blade in a figure-eight pattern that sliced through both of Nanoha's summoned drones. Two-thirds of the streamers in the room abruptly disappeared, and the remainder were not nearly enough to restrict her movements.

A slit opened in her bodysuit on her right flank and she reached inside, pulling out an enormous, slime-coated pistol that could only have been concealed in her abdominal cavity. The captain had no idea what it did – the fuel tank suggested a flamethrower, yet the barrel was completely the wrong shape – but she'd seen enough of the invaders' technology to know she _really_ didn't want to find out.

"Is this it?" the creature growled. "My final request, and _this_ is all you can provide? I won't make this quick, Takamachi."

For Nanoha, the experience was surreal, dreamlike. Being lectured nonsensically by a psychotic shapeshifter was not something that she regularly made a habit of (apart from the unfortunate incident with Arf and the bottle of retsina, anyway, but that didn't really count), and her injuries didn't help matters either. Her vision swam, and she shook her head to clear it.

Groggily, she brought her own weapon to bear, mustering all of her speed to do so. Even if she did get a bead on her target first, she knew she wouldn't have time to charge one of her beam attacks before her opponent fired... but then again, she had other options.

Though the featureless mask covering her face betrayed no expression, Nanoha could have sworn that the assassin's eyes widened behind the two small green windows that covered them as she realised what was about to happen – and then Raising Heart spoke.

"Barrel Shot!"

A cylinder of distorted air materialised from the staff's tip, freezing the creature in place. A grim smile split Nanoha's face as she prepared the main attack, drawing on all the magical residue left over from their battle.

"_Starlight Breaker_!"

In the close confines, the bombardment-level spell never had a chance to develop into a beam, instead skipping straight to the 'massive explosion' stage. The world vanished in a haze of pink light, and Nanoha blacked out.

When she came to, the Divine Assassin was a crumpled, comatose heap on the floor. Her pistol had apparently gone off when she was caught in the blast, which would certainly explain the gigantic hole in the wall, its edges still glowing bright orange. The rest of the room was a burnt-out shell, every screen smashed, every instrument broken.

_Sorry, Hayate._

* * *

Despite the destruction of the gate reinforcing the attack on their headquarters, Hayate was still extremely busy. Other gates still existed, and though the readings from DSS were a great help in finding them, getting rid of them was another matter entirely. Shamal had confided to her that Fate had been lucky not to lose her arm, and she was an S+-ranked veteran. For ordinary troops, clearing out one of the daemons' nests was a nigh-impossible task. Hayate had had to organise ad-hoc squads of particularly powerful mages to seek and destroy the gates, taking turns to ease the effects of attrition, which, while effective, naturally drew them away from other problems that had arisen – problems such as the ones Fate's team were currently facing in the spirewards quarters.

Without daemonic support, the Hellhounds had gone to ground, mining the block's corridors with their grenades and launching punishing hit-and-run attacks on the relief force. Their advance had slowed to a crawl, and she shuddered to think what would have happened if Nanoha's data-package hadn't informed them about the cyborgs' concealment trick. Not that that had been the most disturbing revelation the chief combat instructor had provided.

Hayate sighed and massaged her temples – a gesture that had become something of a habit of late. At least their network was beginning to link up with others spreading across the station, and she would soon be relieved of her command by someone with shinier epaulettes. She wasn't sure how much more she could take.

A comm-window appeared above her desk. It was Nanoha, looking rather the worse for wear and standing in a room that was mostly comprised of charred wreckage. Hayate felt a horrible sinking feeling, and covered her face with her hands.

"Nanoha, _please_ tell me that's not our brand-new, squeaky-clean security centre you're in..."

The combat mage winced. "I'm afraid so, but we've got bigger problems. I just had a run-in with one of their elites, and she was babbling something about 'children'. Have you had any word from Erio and Caro yet?"

"No, nothing. Fate's in the right area; I'll see if she-"

Another window popped up, the symbols indicating a general-broadcast message. Erio's face dominated the screen – pale, frightened, and yet set into a carefully-composed expression of stoic nonchalance. A long, dull grey blade was held against his throat, beads of sweat dripping down onto it as the young mage spoke.

"Colonel Yagami," he said, his voice strained and almost robotic, "this is Private Mondial reporting in. I apologise, but Private La Rushe and I have been captured by the enemy, who wish to negotiate terms with you in exchange for our safe return. If you are interested, please head to our room in the spirewards quarters."

Hayate nodded, feeling nausea bubble up inside her. "Acknowledged, Private. I'll be on my way. Stay calm – we'll get you out of there safely. I promise."

The mask shattered, leaving a hurt, terrified boy where the professional soldier had been a moment before. "Thank you, Colonel. _Please_ come soon. They-"

The link cut off, and Hayate was left staring at the wall. She opened a conference channel to Fate and Nanoha, both of whom looked like they'd just been punched repeatedly in the intestines.

"You heard that, I take it?"

"Loud and clear." Nanoha's voice was cold with rage. "What are your orders, Hayate?"

"Fate, you'll be clearing us a path. Here are the co-ordinates. Once you're there, adopt standard hostage protocols."

The blonde captain saluted, flinty-eyed. "Aye, ma'am. Let them _try_ and stop me. I welcome it."

"Nanoha, get yourself patched up with Shamal. You're on fire support."

"Not a problem. What about you?"

"Me?" Hayate stood up, grabbing her pendant from the desk. "I'll be finding out what exactly it is that these vermin want."

* * *

Ten minutes later, she stood outside the blasted-in doorway of her two youngest privates' quarters, Barrier Jacket activated and staff in hand. She saw no signs of life in the room, but the wreckage inside provided any number of hiding places, and Shamal's preliminary scan had confirmed that both children were still alive.

Fate was patrolling the perimeter, checking for any alternate escape routes the Hellhounds might have up their armoured sleeves, whilst Nanoha was getting into position further down the corridor, sufficiently far away that the glow of her weapon's charging would not alert her targets. An impromptu strike team waited in the wings, ready to move in as soon as they received her signal.

"All right," Hayate said to the silent chamber. "I'm here. What are your terms?"

The voice that replied was a stilted, tinny whisper that could only be considered human by distant relation. "Want escape. Give transport. Safe passage. We give children. Deal?"

"I want to know your prisoners are safe first," she replied, trying to buy Nanoha some preparation time. "Let me talk to them."

Silence.

"Did you hear me?"

More silence. Then the screaming began.

It was the sound of children in the purest agony – primal, wordless, and utterly harrowing. Accompanying it was the chanting, the low, slick chanting that bored into the brains of everyone present.

"EXCELION BUSTER!"

A comet of pink light streaked from Nanoha's position, detonating inside the room with a titanic explosion. Fate tried to approach, grey-faced, but her partner was already there, holding her tight and pleading with her incoherently, tears streaming from her eyes.

"Turn away Fate please _please_ turn away you can't look I won't let you look..."

Hayate had already opened a comm-channel to the infirmary, screaming down the link.

"Shamal! Shamal, get over here NOW!"

Even as she spoke the words, though, she knew it was far, far too late.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** ...And with that, we come to the end of the battle for the central office. The war, on the other hand? Not so much.

See you next week!


	25. The Morning After

**24. The Morning After**

"It was a trap," Shamal said in a quiet, dead voice. "The intention was to lure a senior officer within striking distance and eliminate her, using gates formed from their hostages to provide reinforcements. Another few seconds, and Hayate would have been dead and the strike team would have been neck-deep in daemons. You made the right decision, Nanoha."

Everything she said could have been quite easily deduced by anyone present at the disastrous hostage-retrieval operation, but it needed to be spoken aloud nevertheless.

"That's... not why I did it, though," the captain replied. _They were suffering... they were suffering so much. I couldn't let it continue. I couldn't._

They were seated in Shamal's office, a tranquil place attached to the main infirmary and lined with certificates, souvenirs, and photographs that had been miraculously untouched by the attack. The air was thick with disinfectant, almost overcoming the stink of butchered human emanating from next door.

The Chief Medical Officer's expression softened. Were it not for the calm, professional mask that she always adopted at times like these (insofar as they had _had_ times like these previously), Nanoha was sure that she would have got up from her desk and given her guest a hug. Shamal tended to take a more familial role than was usual for the doctor-patient relationship – it was one of the more minor eccentricities present in the First Expeditionary Force, and tolerated for much the same reason as all the others.

"I know." Mind-reading was not amongst the designated talents of the guardians of the Tome of the Night Sky, but sometimes it seemed that it might as well have been.

The assault on the central office had ended thirty-six hours ago, after a last, desperate assault by no less than four dozen Hellhounds on the station's life-support systems. That had not been the end of the First's involvement, though – far from it. They had been deployed to the ruins of one of Mid-Childa's many residential districts, there to support the horribly overstretched DPR clean-up teams. Fortunately, most of the front-line officers had some measure of experience with such work, and when employing something with the peculiar properties of magic, the only real difference between blasting through a wall to get to trapped survivors and banishing a charging daemon was that the wall didn't try to get out of the way when one pointed a Device at it.

Those with more exotic talents put them to use as well. A long-duration, low-intensity shield made a reasonably serviceable shelter or structural support, teleportation was handy for getting civilians from places they shouldn't be (such as directly beneath a collapsing roof) to places they should (such as the nearest field hospital), and the benefits of having a healer or two with battlefield experience went without saying. Other mages worked on providing for those they had rescued. Ice spells like Hayate's Atem des Eises could provide clean, fresh water where none would otherwise be available, fire magic such as that which Signum and her Unison Device Agito specialised in was an easy source of light and heat, and even Inspector Acous, one of the few survivors of the attack on GovCentral, had donated the basic principles of his infamous cake-summoning spell to the Infinite Library in the hope that they might be able to adapt something more practical (and nutritious) from it with which to feed the refugees. The Belka-type melee specialists had not been left out either, their enhanced speed and strength finding a multitude of uses.

In other circumstances, it might have been rather enjoyable – a chance to discover new and inventive applications for their powers in a field only tangentially related to their usual line of work. As it was, though, the operation was a soul-crushing ordeal that none of them wished to repeat.

Bodies lay everywhere, of all ages and in varying states of repair. Most of the survivors were injured to some extent – even several of those who had managed to avoid the twin threats of the enemy and the treacherous landscape had had their eardrums ruptured or their retinas burnt out due to standing too close to a magical discharge. After the third legless child, weeping less because of the pain and more because of the utter incomprehensibility of it all, the whole grim tableau began to appear as a horrible, nonsensical blur to the combat mages' sleep-deprived brains. Yet more of their rescuees were simply insane, their minds snapped by the horror of what lay around them and the malevolent forces let loose in the city. A sweet-faced grandmother had tried to cave in Fate's head with a rock, her incoherent, alien babbling interjected with screams of "SISTER!" in a voice not her own, and Nanoha had been forced to remove her from her partner's back via the careful employment of her bayonet.

The operation was not without other risks, either. Quite apart from the natural hazards of the wreckage that ranged from falling debris to tangled power lines in the poorer quarters, the Hellhounds had left more than a few little presents behind. Even the most innocuous objects seemed to contain proximity-set grenades or form part of some intricate trap, as Corporal Nakajima's squad discovered when a cheap electric blender filled the room they were investigating with jagged, red-hot shrapnel. Corporal Lanster later admitted to her captain that if it had not been for her cyborg friend's superhuman reflexes, all of them would have been flayed alive.

Added to this volatile mix was a sense of creeping, twitchy paranoia. Horror stories about the enemy's elite operatives, their assassins, had been circulating the telepathic network with such intensity that Command (or what remained of it, at least) had been forced to adopt a strict information-control policy before the situation got completely out of hand, and even then the damage had been done. Now everyone knew about the snipers who could kill you from two suburbs away, the claw-handed berserkers who could dismantle a veteran melee team in seconds, the living ghosts who could shrug off bombardment-level magic and turned everything they touched to dust, and the blade-limbed shapeshifters who could be anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The Humanoid Interfaces had assured them that the threat had been dealt with, but after an incident in the south-western districts where _something_ in the guise of a refugee had wiped out five rescue squads before a bombardment team from the Seventh Artillery had levelled the entire area, such assurances began to ring increasingly hollow. Though the First had been fortunate enough to avoid it, there had been several reported incidents where combat mages had opened fire on civilians, often employing justifications that only made sense if one had been awake for over two days in a pleasant, peaceful metropolis that had abruptly turned into hell on earth.

Those were the most subtle, insidious threats – the psychological ones. Most of the relief force had been subjected to some sort of traumatic event during the attack – the loss of loved ones, first-hand experience of the invaders' horrific tactics, or just a quiet day at the office suddenly depositing them on the front lines of an interdimensional war. They had had no time to recover, though, instead being assigned to non-stop rescue work amongst the broken, the dead, and the dying. The results, predictably, had been messy.

Several times, Nanoha had caught herself zoning out; standing in place for minutes at a time as the screams of trapped civilians faded into the background, or staring at the bloodied corpse of a child as she relived that horrible moment when Shamal's orderlies had wheeled out the small, mangled bodies of the First Expeditionary Force's youngest recruits. Though this was far from advisable behaviour when in charge of high-powered weaponry in a hazardous environment, it wasn't anywhere near the worst case the _Eventide_'s mages encountered during the clean-up.

Six troops were reported AWOL, requiring Nanoha and the other officers to track them down. One was found lying unconscious in the cellar of a ruined pub, having apparently attempted to drink himself to death (with, the medical staff reported, a moderate level of success). Three were discovered under makeshift piles of blankets and pillows, sleeping as if the end of the world would not wake them. The final two were huddled together in the defunct shell of a refrigerator, naked and covered in tears as well as other, more private fluids. They had been detained pending court-martial, of course, but there were few who could not muster some small measure of sympathy for them. The First had reached their physical and emotional limit.

Even the order to stand down had not marked the end of Nanoha's duties – instead, it had simply shifted the emphasis from professional to personal. That was why she was currently in Shamal's office, asking questions she really didn't want to know the answers to.

"Why didn't they warn us?" she wondered aloud. "They must have known what was going to happen. If we'd known, we could have..."

The Wolkenritter looked like she'd swallowed something deeply unpleasant and possibly spiky. "I checked the hostages' bodies. Not... all their wounds were inflicted by the gate. Some were... caused beforehand."

'The hostages'. That was what they were calling them now. Not Privates Mondial and La Rushe. Not Erio and Caro. Somehow, it made things easier.

"Oh," she said. After the cavalcade of horrors that was the attack and its aftermath, what was one more?

Nevertheless, her own reaction disturbed her. It was not that she didn't feel grief, loss, or guilt (oh, yes, she _certainly_ felt guilt) for the children's deaths, but it was all rather... distant, somehow, not that much more than what she felt for the many others she had trained who had died that day. Whenever she concentrated on her feelings, her first thought was not 'I miss them' or 'How could I have prevented this?', but rather 'So this is how all the others who've lost loved ones feel'. Being able to see the bigger picture and acknowledge that personal wasn't the same thing as important was generally regarded as a virtue, but Nanoha was having a hard time seeing it that way – especially when she knew of at least two other people who she very much made an exception for.

It wasn't hard to see why such a state of affairs had come about – unlike Vivio, who they had raised together, Erio and Caro had been far more Fate's children. Like her, they had originally been adopted by the vast, ever-expanding Harlaown clan, and like her, they had both come from very unfortunate circumstances. Erio had been a cast-off creation of Project F, the illegal study into human cloning that Precia Testarossa had adapted in her ill-advised attempt to resurrect her daughter, whilst Caro's innate summoning abilities had made her little more than her home village's equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. Nanoha, meanwhile, had been more of a superior officer to them than anything else, especially after they had been placed under her as recruits of Section Six. Though her methods of training were more personal than most, there was still some difference between a teacher and a parent.

The captain bore no grudge against her partner for how things had turned out – she just wished that she'd gotten to know them better. _Too late for that now._

"One other thing," Shamal continued in her I'm-not-sure-you-want-to-hear-this voice. "I think I discovered why they were unable to use telepathy. It's the concealment spell again – I believe it creates a disturbance akin to a low-level anti-magic field as a side-effect. Just enough to disrupt a sensitive ability like that – probably an intentional decision by whoever created it, though we can't rule out simple coincidence."

"Ah, yes, very interesting," Nanoha replied distractedly. "Was there anything else, Shamal?"

If the Chief Medical Officer had been reluctant before, she was doubly so now. "One other thing, yes. I'm sorry, Nanoha, I mean nothing by this, but my job dictates that I have to ask. When you visited the infirmary before the... incident, you opted against a memory wipe. Is... is that your final decision?"

She didn't hesitate for a moment. "Yes. Yes it is. Those I saw die, those I killed... as long as I remember them, some small part of them remains. Who am I to deny them that?"

Shamal smiled tiredly. "I knew you'd say that. That's everything, Nanoha. See if you can get some rest, and if there's something you want to talk about, anything at all, just give the word, won't you?"

"I'll see what I can do. Goodbye, Shamal."

She stood up and started to walk out, feeling a fresh wave of fatigue wash over her. Just before she reached the door, though, she heard the Wolkenritter's voice again.

"Hold on a second – think you might be interested in this."

The captain turned around, her hand hovering over the door's activation switch. "Oh? What is it?"

"A data-probe I had Klarer Wind send out an hour ago. The results just came back, and... well... long story short, Vivio's safe."

With those two small words, Nanoha was more awake than she had been since the attack. "Go on."

"I got this from an after-action report that got declassified a few minutes ago. The St. Hilda Magic School was attacked by several large swarms of daemons during the later stages of the invasion, and several of its buildings were destroyed. The teachers managed to hold them off long enough for their pupils to be evacuated, though, thanks largely to the intervention of a mysterious SSS-ranked mage employing a fighting style they'd never seen before."

"Did the reports mention this mage's appearance?"

"They did indeed. Female, late teens or early twenties, blonde hair, and a black-and-white Barrier Jacket with blue trim."

Nanoha's jaw sagged open. "She _didn't_..."

"I'm afraid so. That said, there was a full head-count at the shelter and her name was on the list, so she clearly managed to get back there safely. Comms are still down in that area of the city apart from the high-encryption military channels – possibly _because_ there was a fight involving a triple-S there – but I'll let you know as soon as there's the opportunity for you to get in touch with her." The hint of amusement in her voice indicated that she knew full well what the tone of _that_ particular conversation would be.

"Thanks, Shamal. See if you can do the same for others – I know that a fair few of the rest of the crew are worried about their own families. In the meantime, I'd best get going."

She left the office torn between blessed relief and maternal wrath at the news, and hating herself for how easily it had shunted aside her thoughts on her other two children's deaths. Attempting to distract herself, she patched into the network once more.

As was normal in the military, stories, rumours, and anecdotes had been circling amongst the troops throughout the attack and its aftermath. Command had done some careful pruning, giving the positive, encouraging stories particular emphasis and factoring in a pro-Bureau spin wherever it could. Despair, distrust, and recriminations during one of the biggest humanitarian crises the planet had ever seen would not, they had decided, be terribly productive. Unfortunately, this meant that it was often hard to tell whether any given tale was true or not, but there were some that Nanoha knew to be accurate.

It was Arf who had served as Naval Command's liaison with the Infinite Library, and who had first seen the esper refugees join the fight against the daemons, constellations of red lights rising from the Suzumiyaverse enclave like fireflies at dusk. It was Chrono who had helped dig the special-needs class out from under thousands of tonnes of rubble, their teacher half-dead from preserving his young charges with a hastily-summoned shield for hours on end. It was Yuuno who had discovered the fate of the Hellhound team that had attempted to set fire to the Library's shelves, their only remains the broken, mangled, and disturbingly clean wreckage of their cybernetic implants. Many strange things happened in war, and the invasion of Mid-Childa had had its full complement.

Leaving the First's headquarters was a long and complicated affair during which the squad of nervous recruits responsible for perimeter security pointed various intimidating technosorcerous gadgets at her and ran through the entire checklist of countermeasures against potential infiltrators with a complete lack of deference for her rank and reputation. Seeing as this was exactly what she had trained them to do, she was actually rather pleased at it. Once the procedure was finally over, she strolled away down the endless corridors of the central office, following the occasional signposts to the detention sector.

The dark shadows in the back of her mind seeped forward once more, and she shook her head to dismiss them. _Just a little longer..._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Welcome back for another week, ladies and gentlemen. Did the author read too much Lois McMaster Bujold over the summer? All signs point to 'yes'.

Given how... ah... _close_ Fate and Nanoha were by the time StrikerS rolled around, I couldn't help but find it a little odd in hindsight how little the latter had to do with the former's adoptive children. It's always fun to explore these little incongruities in fanfiction, is it not?


	26. Interview

**25. Interview**

Though the TSAB central office was not known for consistent architecture, the spire containing the detention blocks was particularly unusual. It was separated from the main station by fifty metres of hard vacuum, a maze of support struts and armour-plated bridges all that kept it from drifting off into space. A forest of automated turrets covered both sides of the divide, and the power conduits within the struts that supplied magical energy to the spire were designed so that if said energy-flow were manipulated in _just_ the right way, it would generate a series of explosions that would send the entire structure drifting away from the office and into the firing arcs of no less than twenty-eight defence batteries.

The Bureau prided itself on its humane treatment of prisoners, but when said prisoners varied in ability from mere human field artillery to being able to flatten continents when in a bad mood, a few precautions were only sensible.

It took even longer to get into the spire than it had to leave the headquarters, and at the end of the security checks Nanoha was very relieved that many of the more invasive search methods employed in such situations had been rendered obsolete by the development of technosorcery. Five combat mages escorted her down the access tunnel, big, burly men and women whose Belka-type Devices were well-suited to combat in those close quarters.

As was its habit when there was nothing better to do, Raising Heart ran a series of hypothetical combat simulations based on the environment and the estimated abilities of their escort, and only found three potential courses of action that would result in greater than a fifty per cent chance of victory. It relayed the results of the exercise to its master, presumably as an attempt to take her mind off things, and Nanoha politely ignored it. Her Intelligent Device meant well – it always did – but it was sometimes alarmingly single-minded in its choice of interests.

Chief Warder Nadezhda Niva was waiting for them on the other side. A short, middle-aged woman with the build of a weight-lifter and the personality of everyone's favourite aunt, she had endeared herself to Nanoha when they had worked together in previous cases due to her hard-line stance on prisoner abuse. It was, she suspected, the reason Niva had been put in charge of overseeing the POWs after the attack – the iron-clad security was not just intended to keep out potential moles with an eye on freeing them, but also the innumerable angry, frustrated citizens who would be less than averse to taking it all out on someone helpless and maybe-responsible. Even the Ace of Aces had had some difficulty organising a visit – the warder had made it quite clear that the only reason she was getting in was as thanks for services rendered in helping rehabilitate some of the younger inmates in the past.

Nevertheless, Niva was smiling as the detention block door opened, and Nanoha knew that it was not a facade. The older woman was just the sort of person who, once resigned to something like this, would simply see it as the chance to spend some time with a good friend who she didn't see nearly as often as she would have liked. Not that that would make it any easier to find the body if her guest hurt one of her charges.

"Right on time, Nanoha," the warder said, as cheerfully as if her homeworld had not just been reduced to smoking rubble. "She's on Deck Eight. I told her you were coming, but I'm not sure she listened. She's... well, you'll see when you get there. Just follow me, all right? Don't worry – I can deal with her on my own."

This last sentence was addressed to the escort squad, who withdrew with disciplined efficiency without saying a word. Niva gestured with her arm and the captain fell into step behind her, idly scratching at the bandages underneath her shirt when she was sure her guide wasn't looking. Shamal had told her not to and Nanoha had promised herself she wouldn't, but right now it was the least harmful form of stress-relief she could manage.

The spire had a certain atmosphere to it – internally, it much resembled the rest of the central office only with thicker doors and armed patrols, but the true differences were more subtle. There were no flashes of colour amongst the endless grey, no casual, friendly conversations between employees – in short, no _life_. Even the lights seemed a little dimmer, the corridors a little narrower. It was painfully obvious that the only reason for one to take up residence here was that one had been a Very Bad Person.

None of this seemed to affect Niva, though. She had popped her Barrier Jacket at the start of the journey but seemed eminently relaxed, whistling tunelessly and tossing her Intelligent Device, a stubby mace she called Lawmaker, between her hands like a juggler's baton. Prisoners seemed to settle in their cells as she walked past, and some even called out semi-friendly greetings which she responded to with unfeigned cheer. Nanoha had met a lot of warders who command the fear of their charges, but rarely the respect, and even more rarely something even remotely approaching liking. It was hard to reconcile this Nadezhda Niva with the one who had faced down a thousand-strong prison riot, mace in hand and a handful of terrified, inexperienced combat mages at her back... including a certain Lieutenant Takamachi, the gleaming epaulettes fresh on her uniform.

Even her good cheer, though, was insufficient once they reached the blocks that contained the Chaos troops captured during the battle on the station. Underneath their helmets and bodysuits, the Hellhounds were absolutely identical, cell after cell containing an occupant with the same bald head, the same lean, muscled form, and the same flat, grey-green eyes. They gazed incuriously at the two mages as they passed, not a single one moving from where they stood.

"We had to surgically remove their blades, as well as several other augmentations," the warder explained. "It wasn't just in the interests of security – I don't think these boys were designed for long-term usage. Their bodies were already starting to reject the cybernetics. They've been ideal guests, really, in their own way. All you have to do is convince them that they have no chance of escape, and they'll obey you without causing any trouble. Honestly, they're almost like robots."

They stopped outside one door that was quite different from the others, inscribed with what Nanoha dimly recognised as runes of warding. A faint magical aura pulsed from inside it – not the one she recalled from the fight in the security centre, though that was there as well, suppressed by the familiar pattern of a restraint collar.

"Still, it could be worse," Niva continued. "They could all be like this lady. It's not that she's tried to escape or anything like that – the only times she resists are when we try to offer her food or medical assistance. She seems single-mindedly determined to kill herself. That's why we had to use the chains – I know, I know, they're medieval and barbaric, but it was that or have her claw her own throat out. I keep requesting a proper bed with restraints from the hospitals, but there never seems to be one available. Guess they've got better things to worry about than the wellbeing of our highest-ranking and most lucid captive."

"We didn't get any others?" Nanoha asked, surprised.

"Not as far as I know. The snipers each had a false tooth containing a cyanide capsule as well as a few other failsafe systems – trust me, you _don't_ want to know the details – the berserkers simply exploded, and the anti-magic specialists... well, the Humanoid Interfaces had to deal with them, and they don't make a habit of leaving much behind. As for the shapeshifters, all they had to do was transform their internals into something incapable of sustaining itself. Chief Librarian Scrya only came up with a countermeasure in time to save this last one, and even that was a close-run thing. If you'd hit her with something less powerful, we'd be clean out of leads."

"Oh? Why was Yuuno involved?"

"I'm not sure myself, really. He said something about 'atonement', of all things, but I don't see what he had to atone for. That info the Library supplied during the invasion saved all our tails. You ask me, he did all he could and then some."

The sounds of the medical gurneys' wheels and of Fate's agonised, disbelieving sobs came back to her as they had so many times since the attack. _I think I know._ "Go on."

"It was really quite clever, his idea. You know there are specific forms of dispel magic that can interrupt transformations, right? The kind you use when you get into a fight with a familiar, for instance. Well, he took the basic principles of that and combined it with an aspect of shielding magic – specifically, the way shields can be tailored to be stronger against specific threats, like heat, cold, or magic. End result – a spell that suppresses _physical_ shapeshifting rather than the magical kind. That's what all the runes are for, you see. It wasn't perfect, mind – I'm just surprised he got it to work as well as he did, to be honest. It's one of the reasons I'm not convinced by the fact she's eating of her own volition; it's pretty easy to avoid the nutritive aspects when you can reconfigure your own digestive system. Think she's tried to do the same with her respiratory – luckily, the trachea's a bit tougher than the intestines, and she doesn't seem to have taken enough biology classes to try something more creative. Yet, anyway."

"Sounds like we don't have much time," the captain observed.

"I'm afraid you're right. That's one of the reasons I let you visit – she asked for you specifically, and if there's even a chance that someone can get through to her before..." She trailed off.

"Fair enough. Best not keep her waiting any longer, then."

"My thoughts exactly." Niva keyed in the entry code, and the door slid open.

The assassin's true form was remarkably unintimidating – a thin, wiry girl with close-cropped blonde hair and a pointed, almost elfin face. Nanoha distinctly remembered her being rather curvier during their prior confrontation – evidently, superhuman shapeshifters had some measure of vanity as well. She wore clean, functional prison clothing and sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, studying the runes on the walls. Chains enclosed her wrists and ankles, attached to weights that Nanoha was sure only a Belkan melee specialist could have lifted.

She walked into the small room, stopping a metre or so away from its occupant, and heard the door close behind her. On the other side of the armoured glass window, Niva gave her a thumbs-up and withdrew to the side.

"Um... hello?" she began, feeling intensely awkward.

The assassin didn't respond for a moment. When she did, her voice was as dry and reedy as if she had not drunk anything for days. _Maybe she hasn't._

"Takamachi. Glad you turned up. At least you can get _something_ right. Just what does a girl have to do to get killed... around... here... _oh_."

She turned around, her brown eyes boring into Nanoha like diamond-tipped drills. "They're dead, aren't they? The children. Well, I'm screwed then. Nice knowing you, Takamachi."

"How did you know?" The girl seemed to Nanoha to have deflated somehow, her carefully-cultivated poise vanishing as if it had never existed.

"Studying body language is something we get a lot of training in – wouldn't be able to do our job otherwise. That, and I'm a low-level empath, so I can read surface emotions. Can't pluck the thoughts out of your head, mind, but it's the next-best thing. I know they're dead just like I know they were yours, just like I know you've got a couple of busted ribs under that uniform, though I must say you've done a very good job of concealing that last fact. Magical healing's fascinating, isn't it? Can deal with flesh wounds just fine, poisons aren't a problem, but break one little bone and you're pretty much stumped."

The captain felt, not unreasonably, that she was losing control of the conversation. "You said that before – that you're doomed, that Eri-the _hostages_' fate was somehow tied to yours. You're not just talking about our reaction, are you?"

A parched chuckle. "You lot? Don't make me laugh. It's the gods. They have this _thing_ about children getting hurt – can't say I blame them – and I was in command of the mission. The Hellhounds are animals, creatures designed only for killing. I was the one with a fully-functioning brain. I was the one who was supposed to keep them under control. I was the one who fucked up. My fault."

"So you think they're coming for you?"

"Takamachi, I _know_ they're coming for me. They're coming, and they're going to make me suffer as I never have before."

She tugged on her trouser leg distractedly, her face contorting as she tried to find a way to express herself.

"Let me put it into perspective for you. The Divine Assassin training course lasted four years. Four years subjective, sure, but that's beside the point and kind of a long story. During that time, we were subjected to the most brutal training the gods could conjure. We were forced to run until we dropped, used as test subjects for experimental mutations and cybernetics, and tortured for days just to see if we could take it. At the end of it, we were given one final test."

The assassin paused a moment, cold horror creeping over her face as she remembered.

"We were put into the care of a Keeper of Secrets for a week. A greater daemon of the Old Gods, a creature that reduced Lady Mislaato to catatonic insanity before her resurrection and ascension. It had been given orders to break us, and for the next seven days that is exactly what it did. We were raped, Takamachi. We were raped in mind, body and soul. Everything that made us human, everything that made us _us_, was taken apart with tender, loving care and then put back together so that monster could do it all over again. Those who succumbed were granted swift, merciful deaths. The survivors became Divine Assassins. It worked, you know. There is no torment, no humiliation you can inflict that has not been visited on me three times over already. In fact, I could probably give you tips."

She saw the expression her guest wore, and smiled a wintry smile.

"That was a greater daemon, Takamachi. A powerful servant, but a servant nonetheless. Now imagine what the _gods_ can do if they are given reason."

"They don't have to, though," Nanoha replied, trying to keep her voice level. "We can stop them. We can keep you safe."

Another bitter laugh. "Safe? You're kidding, right? In case you hadn't figured it out by now, you're dealing with gods. As in, G-O-D. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. You've already had a small taste of their power – which branch did we do the most damage to? Army? Navy? Air Force?"

The captain knew that disclosing any more information than was necessary was a very, very bad idea, but after all she'd seen, her tongue didn't wait for permission.

"Mostly, it was the civilians." The assassin wasn't the only bitter one in that room – far from it.

"Civilians?" The girl looked honestly nonplussed. "Why?"

"I was hoping you could tell me that," Nanoha replied acidly. "Or did massacring non-combatants not serve any greater strategic purpose? Inquiring minds want to know."

"No... no, this is bad, really bad." The assassin was rocking back and forth agitatedly, obviously distressed. "Was it all of them? Were they all doing that?"

"A lot of them, yes." It was well past time to end the interview – there was nothing helpful or constructive about what was happening here – but some grim compulsion kept the captain where she was.

"Oh no. Oh no no no no no. We failed them. All of us. They'll... I don't know what they'll do." She looked back at Nanoha, raw panic in her eyes. "_How could we let this happen_?"

"Generally, a systematic failure of an operation like that is due to inadequacies in planning and equipment, not the fault of the troops on the ground," her guest pointed out, speaking the words in precisely the manner that Admiral Lindy Harlaown had imparted them to her so very long ago. The fatigue was creeping up on her again, making her mind drift to strange and distant places.

"That... that can't be right. They're the gods, they wouldn't... everything that happened, everything you say happened is anathema to them, but they're the gods, they know everything, they must have known, they must have suspected... that's it! They knew our weaknesses, they knew our flaws, but they expected us to rise above them, to surpass them, I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry..." She was weeping openly, and at that moment Nanoha wanted nothing more than to sit beside her and give her a hug.

Instead, she kept asking, kept digging, peeling away the layers of the assassin's fragile psyche. Tact was gone, followed shortly by sensitivity, flaking away like the collapsed wall they had found the dead family behind, three generations united at the very end, vanishing like the screams in that twin bedroom as her spell detonated inside, condemning three souls to captivity and two to death.

"If you believe it's your fault, that you deserve this... why are you trying to kill yourself? Why not just wait for their judgment?"

The girl looked up, blinking tears away. "Because... because I'm weak. Because I'm a failure. I'm scared, Takamachi. I don't want to die, but I know... I know I have to. I don't _want_ them to take me away, not to that."

Her back straightened, and a trace of iron entered her voice. "I'm not going to betray them, though. I've done enough already. No sense in compounding it."

Nanoha shook her head. "Why? Why do they command such loyalty after all they've done?"

The shame and the sadness were gone, replaced with anger. "What they have _done_ is to protect us, Takamachi. They saved us from the Angels. They saved us from Third Impact. They unified us in our darkest hour and transformed us into something far greater than we had been before. A few pretty words, a few energy blasts – they can _never_ change that."

"And now?"

"And now they are still protecting us from threats both external and internal, and it was a _privilege_ to fight at their side! Do you know what the Divine Assassins originally did, during our trial missions before we were deployed? We were hunters, Takamachi, hunters of the scum of society. I've read your file – you were in law-enforcement too, weren't you? Remember the first time you took down a big bad? A serial rapist, a human trafficker, or the like. Remember how good it felt to know that they wouldn't hurt anyone ever again, like you were the hand of divine justice?" She smiled at the memory. "Of course, in our case, we actually _were_..."

"And in our case," Nanoha commented drily, "they actually survived long enough to be taken into custody."

The only sign that the assassin had heard her was a derisive snort. "Then there's you lot. The folks back home are really hungry for revenge, you know – the opening salvo of the war being a twelve-year-old girl getting shot in the back will do that."

This time, it was the captain's turn to look nonplussed – she honestly hadn't even considered how her actions on Bloodhaven might have looked to others.

"I was trying to rescue her!" she protested.

"Right, sure, 'rescue'. What was the matter? Was she saying nice things about the gods? Were her table manners not perfect? Honestly, you Bureau saps are all the same. Think you can make someone _better_, and if they've already got a loving family, well, who gives a fuck? They clearly aren't good enough for her because you say so, right? She was the gods' own beloved daughter, did you know that? Or are 'deities who actually give a damn about their worshippers' not an acceptable category in the Mid-Childan Prospective Parents roster?"

"When I met her," Nanoha said, struggling to keep her voice level, "Alicia was in the middle of the battlefield, torturing enemies and _eating their souls_. I've been privy to a few child-abuse cases in my time, assassin, and I think I know black pedagogy when I see it. Did your side's after-action reports not mention what her oh-so-loving parents were using her for?"

The assassin stared at her a moment, and then broke her gaze.

"Damn it," she muttered. "I hate knowing when they're telling the truth. Can't say I heard that, no."

"What do you remember of the time before you were recruited?" the mage asked gently, deciding to change tack.

"Not much. Not _anything_, really. The mind-wipes were all part of our preparation. We were assassins – that was enough. We knew we'd be making sacrifices when we volunteered – well, I think we did, anyway. I can't remember."

"And you spent most of your time between then and now training in relative isolation, yes?"

"Yeah," the assassin said reluctantly. "Yeah, we did. Look, if you're casting doubts on the validity of the information I received about the outside world, forget it. I'm an empath, remember? I can _tell_ when someone's feeding me bullshit. When they're talking to me, anyway. Not when I'm, say, reading something. Or when they're downloading straight into my brain. Gods, I hated that."

There was a brief, contemplative pause.

"That wasn't why the war started, you know," Nanoha continued. "Command was prepared to offer amends, pass it off as the actions of an emotionally-compromised agent operating without orders – and I suppose they were right, really. She was family, assassin. Not mine, not directly, but close enough to count. I expect you didn't know that either. I couldn't let them keep turning her into a monster, not without a fight."

"So why did it?" the girl asked, her face unreadable.

"Because of what you did to those other universes. The galaxy of the Praxis, torn apart in a civil war worse than anything that bloody-handed regime could muster. The galaxy of the Federation, subjected to the same with even less justification. The Suzumiyaverse, brought under the heel of an insane tyrant and turned into a living nightmare. The home of your daemon-world, the place with those Stargate constructs, manipulated into providing you with weapons and fighting at your side only to be abandoned to implacable invaders, their forces decimated and their greatest advantage stolen from them. Those last two were why we didn't try to negotiate, didn't warn you that we would be coming. They did that, they tried to play fair, and all you did in turn was take advantage of and destroy them. Why was that, assassin? What were you protecting then?"

"Everyone. The C'tan... they'll come someday. We need to be ready for them. The other universes, their powers, their technologies... we can use them to arm ourselves, to destroy the threat before it ever comes to fruition. It's not pretty, but it's necessary, and after it's done... we can start the healing. That's what the gods do. They break things... and put them back together, better than before." A cracked, mad smile lit up her face. "Like me. Just like me."

"And in the meantime, more people will die. How many more? How many sacrifices before you're done? If you believe this is the best way to save the multiverse from these C'tan, whoever they are, then I'm afraid I must consider you gravely mistaken."

The girl tried to snigger, but it soon turned into a bout of dry, pained coughing. "'Gravely mistaken', huh? Ooh, I _felt_ the venom in that one. That's some sort of ultimate insult for you, isn't it? Everything you say we've done, and all you can call me is 'gravely mistaken'? Mislaato's tits, Takamachi, but you're repressed. Explains why you don't give a flying crap about those kids of yours, anyway."

A flash of pink light illuminated the cell, and Raising Heart was in Nanoha's hand, its blunt tip pointed at the assassin's throat. There was no aura around it, no build-up of energy for an attack spell – it was just a big, heavy metal stick. Its target grinned, looking up at the Ace of Aces invitingly.

"Go ahead. Take it out on me. Gods know I deserve it."

There was a long, pregnant silence, and then she lowered her weapon, her hands suddenly shaking. "That's another difference between the Bureau and Chaos, assassin. We don't torture helpless captives."

"More like you don't deliver justice where it's needed. What're your lot planning to do to the Hellhounds, then? The ones who took your kids?"

"They'll be confined to an orbital facility with full psychiatric support," Nanoha explained levelly, "and that's where they'll remain until the day they're rehabilitated or the day they die. They won't be hurting anyone else."

"And... you're absolutely fine with this, aren't you?" the girl asked incredulously. "Whoa. Not to tell you how to do your job, Takamachi, but if it were me, I'd have headed on down to wherever they're keeping them, and they'd _still_ be trying to pick up the bits and pieces I left behind."

The captain crossed the remaining distance between them in moments, her ribs shrieking out in pain. Her hand shot out, dragging the assassin upright until their faces were scant inches apart.

"The day before yesterday was the first time I killed," she growled. "Six of them were valued employees, men and women with loving families and excellent career prospects who I had nothing but the utmost personal and professional respect for. The last two were my own adoptive children. Erio and Caro came from backgrounds that would have broken any lesser individual, and they came out happy, caring, and the finest recruits I have ever had the privilege of training. They battled against monsters and criminals, protected the innocent, and saved the life of the woman I love most in the world. Your animals, your killing machines? _They do not deserve it_."

Her captive was stock-still, the only signs of life the movements of her eyes.

"Here is what I am going to do, assassin. I am going to make sure the Hellhounds get the help they need, that they are given the chance to become productive members of society. I am going to stand against your gods' forces, no matter what strange powers or arcane technologies they might wield, and I am going to cleanse their masters' taint from their hearts, their minds, and their souls. Then, once all else is done, once the war is over and the universe is at peace once more, I shall go to your gods and I shall forgive them, for they have strayed far from their path and know not what they do. I shall forgive them, and I shall grant them what healing and redemption I can muster. People die in war. I can accept that. I am only one amongst billions. I can accept that. But even if this is impossible, even if I fail, this is the path I shall strive to walk. _This_ is the will of Nanoha Takamachi. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"

The last words were a scream, delivered full-force into the assassin's face. Nanoha let go, and she slumped to the floor bonelessly. The captain walked to the door, not looking back, and rapped on it three times. It slid open, revealing Niva's squat form on the other side.

She strode down the corridor, the Chief Warder in tow. "Nadezhda, see if you can up the security on her cell. I'll talk to Shamal, see if she can get her a proper bed. I want her safe, and I want her comfortable."

"Fine," the older woman replied, an edge to her voice. "First, though, we have to talk."

Nanoha deflated, almost collapsing against the nearest wall.

"Why didn't you stop me?" she asked in a small voice. "I..."

"The runes weren't the only things Scrya added," Niva informed her coolly. "There are four pop-up turrets in that cell. I had them trained on you for most of the interview. Nanoha, I don't think you should visit the detention sector any more."

"I... understand," the captain replied at last. "Let's go."

The rest of the walk passed in silence.

* * *

Fate was waiting for her when she arrived back at her room – or, at least, she had tried to. Fatigue had won out, and her partner was curled up, fully-clothed, on their bed, her eyes red and her hair still streaked with dirt from the clean-up operation. Nanoha studied her affectionately for a moment, before climbing next to her and holding her tight.

"Vivio's all right," she whispered in her ear, and then the tears came, all the grief, the stress, the rage, and the gnawing despair bottled up since the attack pouring out at once.

At last sleep took her as well, delivering her to a quiet, dark place where there was no war, no death... only peace.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Anyone who has been keeping count will notice that this is the chapter where we cross the one hundred thousand-word milestone. Whew.

The employment of the Keeper of Secrets from Thousand Shinji was yet another of the Open Door's eyebrow-raisers for me. Using the creature that basically destroyed your mind to do the exact same thing to a bunch of teenagers (and, in the original, one centuries-old, brainwashed POW)? I don't know about you, but for me, that's about on par with the victim of a child molester cheerfully giving him directions to the nearest primary school. Then again, consistency has never been the gods' strong suit. Why'd you think I felt the need to explore it in this fic?

The more observant readers may have noticed that where the Nanoha-verse is concerned, I've continued the original series's tradition of giving names based off various models of automobile to those characters without Earthborn ancestry. The Chief Warder was one I was particularly proud of, seeing as not only is 'Nadezhda' a perfectly acceptable first name in real life, but it and 'Niva' are also vehicles produced by the Russian car brand Lada (a minivan and SUV, respectively). A pleasing coincidence, no?


	27. Tidying Up

**26. Tidying Up**

From a certain perspective, Hikari Horaki was a very fortunate person.

She was a daemon princess, most favoured of the gods and resurrected by their benevolence. She had a prestigious job as their personal advisor and liaison with the human population, and a literally superhuman husband whose love and kindness she still wasn't entirely sure she was worthy of. All told, an unfamiliar observer might have wondered why she wasn't happier with her lot in life.

An unfamiliar observer, of course, would have missed a few salient points.

First off, said husband had spent the entirety of the past few months on a forsaken dirt-ball in the middle of nowhere along with enough firepower to crush planets... and she had no idea _why_. Toji had tried to stay cheerful whenever they could both spare the time for a meeting (not often), but she had seen the haunted look in his eyes. Whatever was happening on Bloodhaven was not pleasant at all.

Second, her job of late had been less about ensuring the wellbeing of their citizens, and more about coming up with excuses for why their nice, laissez-faire society was rapidly going to hell in a handbasket. The solar system was in disarray, more in the Warp than not. Unnatural storms crackled across the Earth's surface, as likely to rain blood as water, as likely to dispense hordes of screeching, amorphous flyers as lightning bolts. Eight orbital facilities had been declared off-limits to human personnel, and were gorging themselves on a steady diet of clones and daemons. It was within Hikari's power to discover where they had all gone, but after investigating the first one, she had decided she didn't want to know.

The threats were not purely external, either. With the gods' eyes elsewhere, the Earth's population had discovered just how sustainable their current lifestyle was without divine intervention, and the answer was 'not very'. Food riots had broken out, careful pruning of undesirables had been replaced with makeshift vigilante justice, and even the occasional pocket of organised resistance had begun to pop up here and there in response to the increasingly brutal measures the government (such as it was) was required to take to ensure stability.

Hikari had tried her best, she really had, but things just kept spiralling out of her control. Their latest attempts to artificially accelerate crop growth using the power of the Warp had created twisted abominations that no sane person would go near, let alone eat, and she had been forced to dial back the daemonic ground presence normally employed for law-enforcement as the creatures became increasingly violent and unpredictable (one city-centre massacre over a purse-snatching had been _quite_ enough), only to have to bring them back in as the situation had worsened. In desperation, she had sent out a call for volunteers to help out and had been met with a gratifying number of responses, but building a functioning governmental infrastructure almost from scratch was far from an easy task at the best of times, let alone when it had started snowing frozen cough syrup.

Finally, there were the gods.

There were three of them in the Eye at present, all wearing their human forms, and Hikari wasn't sure whether the sight of her old friends' faces was supposed to reassure her or taunt her with what she'd lost. She wasn't sure of much at all, these days. Mislaato was absent; probably back in her lair indulging herself again, much to the daemon's relief – at least it had nothing to do with her this time.

It had seemed such a small request, that one Tzintchi had given her a week ago. He hadn't seen his third wife for a while, and he was starting to get worried. _So I was wondering, Hikari. Could you pop in to check on her? Shouldn't take more than a few minutes – I'm sure it's nothing, really. Just for my peace of mind, you understand. Thanks – you're a lifesaver._

That hadn't been much comfort, though, once she realised that she was lost in the maze of flesh-walled tunnels branching off the side of the Geofront. It had been even less so when the creature that had once been a woman called Misato Katsuragi came slithering down out of the darkness.

Hikari had missed a not-insignificant part of the war with the Angels on account of being dead at the time, but she still remembered how Misato had been back then – slobbish, frequently drunk, and hopelessly ill-suited to anything approaching parenthood, but a genuinely decent person underneath it all. Under her cheerfully haphazard supervision, the residents of her house had been nobody's vision of an ideal family unit, but nevertheless happy with and remarkably loyal to each other. It had been a _home_, and she had been largely responsible. When she had come back after the others' ascension, she had been... pretty much the same, really, if engaged in a relationship with her three former charges that Hikari could never quite bring herself to approve of.

The being that she had found herself alone in the dark with for those long, terrible hours had borne no resemblance to that person. It had been a creature of insatiable hunger, of pain, pleasure, and the desire to spread both even-handedly. Only after it was done had she seen something else, when it wept and pleaded with her not to tell anyone else. She had honoured its request, telling the leader of the gods that his wife was indisposed at present but on her way to a swift recovery, and she had made absolutely sure that she never had to visit that place ever again.

"Hey there, Hikari," Asukhon said cheerily as the gods registered her presence. "What's the word on Phase One?"

The daemon blinked, embarrassed at being distracted by her reverie and relieved to be free of it. "Most of the primary objectives were completed – all three target universes had their political and military elements disrupted or crippled, as well as losing a great deal of their transport capabilities. Industrial sabotage was less successful, but still enough to cause a significant slowdown. In addition, the latest updates from the Suzumiyaverse indicate that Phase Two is just about ready to go, discounting the odd minor setback."

"I'm sensing a 'but' here," Tzintchi commented.

Hikari winced, bracing herself against what she knew was coming. "Reports from the attack on TSAB space have started coming back, and... there were civilian casualties. Lots of them."

"Children?" Reigle asked in her usual deadpan.

"Many of them, yes. I'm sorry, but... it wasn't even a case of a few getting caught in the crossfire. Quite a few of our troops were specifically targeting them." _Especially the crafted daemons. You know, the ones who are supposed to be extensions of your will. The ones who have started tearing apart your own worshippers of late. Did you know about this, my lord and ladies?_

Their reactions were enough to answer that question.

"You WHAT?" Asukhon stood up, her face suffused with rage.

"This was not an unforeseen outcome," Reigle pointed out calmly. "As noted in my report on the increasing instabilities in-"

"Oh, shut it, Wondergirl," the Goddess of War snarled, her eyes widening as she realised what she'd said. She hadn't used that insult in eighteen years. Whether it was a source of shame or nostalgia, Hikari couldn't tell.

"Remind me, Hikari," Tzintchi said in a level, deadly calm voice, "who was responsible for supervising the Hellhound project again?"

"That'd be Fleshcrafter Allard, but-"

"Good," he replied smoothly. "Have him sent to the Hall of Torments. All the trimmings."

"For what?" someone asked. "For creating them according to your specifications? For warning you that they might be difficult to control, and being ignored? For having them do no worse than _your own crafted daemons_? Which one was it, then? I'd just _love_ to know the answer."

There was silence in the Eye for a few moments, and then everyone stared at Hikari. With a nightmarish sinking feeling, she realised that she had been the one who had spoken.

Tzintchi was in front of her, smiling a mild, friendly smile, brief flickers of unnatural movement passing across his face. He really wasn't that much taller than her in his human form, but the extra inch or two suddenly made a great deal of difference.

"Funny story, Horaki," he said lightly. "A moment ago, I thought I heard a daemon mouthing off to the guy who got her ascended – and, I might add, brought her back to life – on behalf of a worthless little labcoat whose pet monsters were only recently responsible for mass murder. Now, that couldn't have been right, could it? There's no way I heard that. Silly me, must be imagining things."

_Of course you bloody well heard it! For pity's sake, you're condemning an innocent (well, mostly-innocent) man to a fate worse than death! And what's with this 'Horaki' business all of a sudden? I was your class representative back in school for crying out loud, you stuck-up, ungrateful..._ was exactly what she _didn't_ say, though in other circumstances she might have.

If, for instance, she had still been sure that she was talking to Shinji Ikari.

"Y-you're right, my Lord," was what came out instead. "That didn't happen."

A bright, happy grin. "Good! Belay that last order, incidentally – I'm feeling merciful. Have him turned into a daemon instead. The semi-sentient kind. Oh, and I assume something like this won't happen again? It can be very distressing, hallucinating like that."

"Of course, Lord Tzintchi."

He had already forgotten her, though, instead turning back to the two goddesses. She briefly considered sneaking out, but decided against it. Quite apart from the patent foolishness of trying to evade a deity, it was her duty to wait on them in case they had further requests. Hikari had always put a great deal of stock in duty.

"Right then, new plan. Rei, the trackers on the Hellhounds and Divines still work, right?"

"Affirmative."

"Excellent. Asuka, dear, you'll be dealing with the cyborgs. Crafted daemons only – let's keep this an in-house affair, hmm? You can bring back their heads if you really want, but it's hardly mandatory."

Asukhon smiled. "It's true – you really _do_ know how to treat a lady. I take it you'll get the assassins, then?"

"Bingo. Whatever happened down there, they're the ones who need to answer for it. Let's go, people – time's a-wasting."

He discorporated, followed shortly by Reigle. Hikari didn't realise she was shaking – didn't even realise that her inhuman body had the _capacity_ – until the last of the three gods walked up and put an arm around her shoulder.

"Hey," Asukhon said gently. "You all right?"

It took a considerable effort to gain any semblance of a grip on herself. "I... I can't think of anything you should concern yourself with, Lady Asukhon."

"Oh, cut that crap," the goddess said tiredly. "You're a _friend_, Hikari – even if the others have forgotten that, I haven't. Now, I can't say that I agree with you on the whole Allard business, but that shit Shinji pulled was _way_ out of line. Rest assured, we'll be having a long talk about it later, and if someone tries to put that kind of pressure on you again, you know where to find me." She grinned. "Consider it payback for all those lunches you made me, eh?"

Hikari managed a tentative smile. "Thanks, Asuka."

"Hey, no big." The goddess disengaged herself and started to walk away. "Incidentally, I can't help noticing that you've been away from that stooge Toji for longer than usual – I'll see what I can do about that. Need to keep up the morale of our employees, right? In the meantime, though, I've got a few childkillers to butcher. A deity's work is never done..."

As her old friend left, Hikari realised she was still smiling. She let it linger a while, savouring the sensation and reminding herself of how it felt. Then she accessed the latest reports from the surface, the dry, clinical pre-mortem analysis of a slowly dying civilisation, and the smile vanished.

_Work never done? Tell me about it..._

* * *

All told, Nadezhda Niva had had quite enough of living legends for one week.

Captain Takamachi's visit a few days ago had been... a disappointment; there was really no other word for it. Not just in her former protégé, but in herself. Any other person, she was quite convinced, would have been sprawled out unconscious halfway through that disaster of an interview, but she had held her fire, hoping that Nanoha wouldn't go any further, that she knew what she was doing, and there was no telling what damage might have been caused as a result. Now she had another one sitting across from her, and suspected that he could have given certain parasitic worms lessons in getting under her skin.

Inspector Verossa Acous smiled, entirely oblivious to the effect he was having, and conjured a large, gift-wrapped box out of thin air. "Cake?"

The Inspector was one of Bureau Intelligence's best-kept secrets. His personal life was a complete mystery, the extent of his considerable powers an enigma. Even his waist-length green hair (which he swore blind was his natural colour) defied rational explanation – and on a planet like Mid-Childa, there were a _lot_ of potential explanations for such things. Legends still circulated about the brave clerk who had tried to look him up in the Infinite Library, their lurid vagueness and mass of mutual contradictions making it quite clear that no-one had the faintest idea what had happened to the poor man.

Three things were known, though. First, he could read minds with perfect accuracy, a rare and valuable talent that alone managed to justify his continued employment. Second, he had been directly or indirectly involved in every major crisis facing the Bureau in the past ten years. Third, he really, really liked cakes.

"Umm... no thanks," she said at last, wishing fervently that he would stop _smiling_ like that. "My mother always told me not to accept gifts from Intelligence operatives. You never know where they've been."

"Ah? You're sure? It's lemon drizzle. Very good." He lifted the lid and picked out a slice, nibbling it delicately.

"Quite sure, thank you," she said firmly. "Now, you were going to tell me why you're here?"

He chuckled, a light, cheerful sound that set Niva's teeth on edge. "Sorry, didn't I say earlier? It's the assassin you've got cooped up here. Command wanted me to have a little chat with her."

_What, again?_ "I should warn you, Inspector, she's not in a good way. As the person currently legally responsible for her, I'd advise caution."

The smile did not waver. "Relax, major. I've dealt with traumatised or otherwise incapacitated subjects before. So long as she's alive, it won't affect my abilities. In fact, it might make things a little easier."

Niva was about to reply that (a) that was not what she had meant, and (b) she preferred to be addressed as 'warder' rather than by her military rank, when seemingly every single alarm in her office went off at once.

Since Nanoha's visit, security around the POW blocks had been considerably upgraded. Unfortunately, she hadn't been able to provide a clearer picture of what was coming on account of not actually knowing, so Niva had gone for a little bit of everything. Cell doors were reinforced, sophisticated, multi-layered alarm systems were installed, and every square metre of ceiling their budget would allow was lined with compact anti-magic fields and pop-up turrets. All in all, she had been quite sure that they could now withstand any conceivable assault.

There was nothing like half the cell monitors there blinking off in rapid succession to prove one wrong. Especially when they were shortly followed by the other half.

Inspector Acous was already on his feet, brushing crumbs off his immaculate white suit. "I presume that sound's not a standard occurrence around here, major?"

Niva stood up and popped her Barrier Jacket, too worried to be annoyed. "Definitely not. Looks like a simultaneous attack on all our prisoners affiliated with Chaos. If you're willing, we could really use some help."

"Understood." He cocked his head to one side. "Let's see, if those blocks are over _there_, and we're over _here_... I apologise for the imposition, major."

He grabbed her by the arm, and she felt the nauseating lurch of an impending teleport just before her office disappeared around her.

Bereft of its master, the cake-box hovered in place for a few moments before lowering itself onto the nearest table. It could wait.

* * *

The new bed, against all expectations, had actually proven to be rather comfortable. _A shame,_ the assassin thought, _that I didn't have longer to appreciate it._

_OK, tactical appraisal time. I'm strapped to a (admittedly very nice) bed, there's a daemon in the room who's out to claim my soul, I can't transform worth a damn, and my genius idea of starving and dehydrating myself for the past few days has left me as weak as the proverbial kitten. Yay. _There was a perverse sense of accomplishment in encountering a situation that even her extensive training had not explicitly prepared her for.

At least the nature of said daemon gave her some hope. Yes, it was big, yes, it was scary, and yes, the way it had breezed through the block's anti-magic fields to materialise inside her cell before wreaking havoc on its defences had been _very_ impressive, but it was still a Black Pharaoh, one of Tzintchi's crafted daemons, and that meant she had options.

Whereas the once-human ascended mostly retained their own personalities after being given daemonhood (with intellect being directly proportional to power granted), the crafted, the beings formed wholly from the gods' own essence, were simple reflections of their parents. On the one hand, servants who acted as an extension of your will without much in the way of independent thought were always useful in their own manner. On the other, this meant that they had all their patron god's personality flaws and half their brains.

Not long ago, the assassin would have considered the idea of the gods being flawed the gravest of heresies, but when she looked through her memories anew such things became depressingly apparent. Tzintchi, for instance, had an ego the size of a small planet and, consequently, an insatiable desire to show everyone else how clever he was. In short, he gloated. When one coupled this with his status as the god of hope, the more desperate the better... _well, here goes nothing._

The last of the four turrets spat a burst of high-calibre bullets at the daemon, its magical weaponry rendered useless by the same field that was _supposed_ to be weakening the creature. It dropped to the floor, sliding under the machine's arc of fire and disabling it with a swift jab from its energy-cased staff. Despite herself, the assassin was impressed. Even had the daemon's unusual size and resistance to the AMF not already given it away, that little stunt would have surely marked it as a veteran.

Threat eliminated, the Pharaoh sauntered over to the side of her bed. If it had had anything other than a featureless black void for a face, she knew it would have been smirking.

"Afternoon, Number Seventy-Six. Terribly sorry, but I'm going to have to borrow one of your tricks here."

It raised a hand, which promptly turned into a slim, razor-sharp blade. Like its staff, the new weapon was shrouded in the dark energy of the warp. It brought it down in a long, careful slice, cutting through the bed's restraints one at a time. The blade became a hand again, which it politely offered to said bed's occupant.

"Time to head off, Seventy-Six. Don't want to keep the gods waiting, do we?"

She crossed her arms over her chest, an act of childish defiance. "I'm not going. What they're going to do to me... I don't deserve it."

The void expanded, presumably the daemon's equivalent of raising an eyebrow. "Oh? And how do you figure that, then? You were a ground commander during the invasion, after all."

"I was trained to infiltrate, to gather intelligence. So I decided to do my job. Dusted Takamachi with warp-infused nanites during her little spot of prisoner intimidation, piggybacked over to her HQ, and took a look inside their files." She grinned. "Love those little guys. Lady Reigle's best invention."

"Takamachi?" The other thing Tzintchi was the god of, of course, was knowledge. The I-know-something-you-don't-know tactic was catnip to his followers, and both of them knew that this was the only chance for the daemon to get it first-hand. Psychic dissemination just wasn't the same.

"Self-righteous, overly-violent ideologue. You'd like her. Anyway, I flicked through their AARs, and I must say they were quite the interesting read. Seems she was right – it wasn't just my troops that went loco. We're talking a comprehensive breakdown of discipline, way more than any field commander could handle. The devil was in the planning, not the execution."

"So you're saying it was the _gods_ who screwed up?" the Pharaoh asked, its whispery voice taking on a keep-digging tone.

"No, I'm saying the whole mess was _intentional_. Our daemonic support was crafted-only, for a start, just like you. Crafted don't go berserk like that without orders. They just don't. Somebody changed the mission parameters without informing us. That's the real reason they sent you and your buddies after us, isn't it? To keep the whole thing quiet, just in case someone was paying attention like I did. One question, though – how far are the gods involved? Do they know what's stirring in their ranks?"

A ghostly chuckle. "Bits of them do, yes. Maybe more in the future. I'm impressed, Seventy-Six. Nice deductive reasoning there. Not that it changes matters, though." It reached forward again, fingers stretching into taloned, birdlike claws.

"Actually, it does." The talons paused, a few inches away from her face. "I want in."

"Go on."

Her next words were chosen very carefully indeed – getting big pointy things shoved at one concentrated one's mind wonderfully. "I trust the gods – I'd be a fool not to. They haven't led us wrong in two decades. So what could drive them to violate their own taboos and betray their own people on such a colossal scale? Answer – something big. Bigger than just wiping out the C'tan. Something..." she smiled, "_magnificent_. I want to be there, daemon. I want to see the gods' final victory. In return, you get to keep a fully-functional Callidus-pattern Divine Assassin on your side. I'll admit I'm not in the best state at the moment, but rest assured that nothing's been permanently damaged."

"You're right, Seventy-Six," the daemon said reverently. "It is indeed magnificent. More so than even you know. We will, of course, require some proof of your continued loyalty...?"

By now, it was leaning on its staff, completely relaxed, and the assassin knew it was enjoying every minute of this little charade. _First you build up their hopes, then you tear them down, right?_ A memory surfaced from the recesses of her mind – an old one, a relic of her life before her training that the wipes had somehow missed. _Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch..._

She grinned confidently, though not for the reason immediately apparent. "Thought you might say that. Those reports weren't the only thing I filched from their network. Got fully up-to-date information on their casualty rate, their adapted defence plans for this station and their capital, plus tactical evaluations of the Integrated Data Entity's Humanoid Interfaces rattling around in my head. I'd be happy to hand 'em over to the brass – should be very useful for Phase Two."

The daemon pretended to consider this for a moment. "Hrm – seems a good idea."

Its claws shot out and grabbed her by the throat, dragging her out of bed and slamming her against the wall like a rag doll.

"Or," it continued in the exact same conversational tone, "I could drag you back to the Hall of Torments and have the good folks there pull out those tasty little secrets you've got stored in your noggin. Seriously, just how stupid do you think I am?"

_Grabbing up the tar-covered rabbit, Brer Fox swung him around and around and then flung him head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox's fur stood straight up. Brer Rabbit fell into the briar bushes with a crash and a mighty thump. Then there was silence..._

"Real shame you figured so much out, mind," the daemon added, not sounding sorry at all. "Guess I'll have to break you a little before they get a go. Can't have you blabbing to those brats playing at being gods back home, not until they're a little further down the road. Must say, though, the Old Firm really knows how to pick 'em – so many exploitable issues, I wouldn't know where to start. Seriously, have you _seen_ the Oedipus complex that Shinji kid's lugging around? The mind boggles. Anyway, back to work. Here's a little taster – a sneak preview, if you will."

The void expanded once more, and she... saw things in it. She would have screamed if she could have found the air to do so, and every muscle in her body went slack at once with predictable results. She couldn't close her eyes, she couldn't turn away, her mind felt like it was being slowly flayed... and she resisted.

The memories of her time with the Keeper of Secrets that she had tried to suppress for so long became her lifeline, a guiding light through the pain, the stench, and the brain-searing visions. _I have survived worse. Pain becomes strength, if it does not break you. And I cannot break. I will not break._

"But... you're crafted," she wheezed. "Don't you..."

"...Serve Lord Tzintchi?" the Pharaoh finished for her. "Oh yes. Real honour it is, too. Not my fault you've got such a narrow definition of what He is."

The visions intensified, and soon it was all she could do to hold on to her tenuous sanity as she felt it slowly crumbling around her.

It was then that the cell door finally burst open.

Three spectral hounds rammed into the daemon, bearing it to the ground and savaging it viciously. She fell with it, watching, dazed, as it tried to fight back, only for cords of turquoise energy to clamp around it and render it immobile. A short, squat figure darted forward, slamming a gleaming mace into the creature over and over again until it simply shattered in a blast of polychromatic light.

_Took your time, didn't you?_

"I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox," she croaked as she gazed at the pile of smoking, amorphous gunk that had once been a Black Pharaoh. "Born... and... bred..."

She tried to laugh, but it turned all too soon into gulping, ragged sobs. Strong, gentle arms encircled her, and a soothing blue-green light shone before her eyes as she lost consciousness.

* * *

Nadezhda Niva was very, very angry. It had been difficult to see what had happened in most of the Hellhound cells thanks to the red smears that coated the windows on the doors, but the few ones she had seen convinced her that this was a mercy. She had called for medical backup, not in hopes of saving anyone's life (there was a difference between being a natural optimist and being hopelessly deluded), but to get some idea of just what in the name of hell had happened. To Niva, it was a gravely personal insult. They had broken into _her_ prison, slaughtered _her_ inmates... not even beating the living tar out of the overgrown freak they had found in the assassin's room had provided a sufficient catharsis factor.

With all this in mind, it should have been easy for her to hate Inspector Acous as she saw him access the poor girl's memories, the energy from his hand playing across her scalp.

She couldn't do it, though.

He spoke quiet reassurances to her in a calm, steady voice, stroking her hair as one would with a frightened child. Once he was done, he lifted her small, skinny body in his arms, placing her back on her bed and tucking in the sheets around her.

He turned back to the warder, and she saw that the omnipresent smile had vanished. In fact, he looked positively scared.

"Major," he said tightly, "we need to find a Humanoid Interface. _Now_."

She blinked. "Why? What did you find?"

He looked at her levelly, his eyes hollow. "Phase Two."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, if you were waiting for the other shoe to drop re: the gods reaction, so it has. Not that that's going to stop me reeling off cliff-hangers like they're going out of fashion. Authorial mandate, you understand.

Incidentally, I spent the entirety of StrikerS waiting for Inspector Acous to turn on the good guys. True story.

As ever, reviews most welcome. Always nice to know how I'm doing.

See you next week!


	28. Eviction Notice

**27. Eviction Notice**

For the first time in quite a while, Tzintchi was in an unambiguously good mood. Phase Two was ready to go, and everything would soon be back to normal. No mood swings, no powers going out of control, no _untidiness_. Mislaato had apparently made a full recovery from her temporary indisposition (a _very_ full recovery, he noted with pleasantly weary satisfaction), and he had chosen to take it as an omen of what was to come. Finally, their lives and those of their worshippers would be back on track.

He materialised inside the Eye with an extra-cheery shower of sparkles, blowing his assembled wives kisses with three separate mouths. All of them seemed to be in equally high spirits, even Reigle – though it was admittedly hard to tell in her case.

"Behold, for I have arrived!" he proclaimed in his best dramatic voice, setting the furniture to quaking. "And how are the three loveliest ladies in the cosmos this fine morning?"

Asukhon's answering grin seemed, if possible, to show even more teeth than usual. "All the better for you asking, Shinji. Just need to run a few things past you, then we're good to go. Want to check the view first, though? May not be our doing, not directly, but it's pretty damned spectacular."

"You know, I might do just that."

A few complicated wiggles of his tentacles, and the already-tenuous walls of the room vanished. What replaced them were... ships. Millions of them, all several miles long, heavily-armed, and impressively spiky. Phase One had been a series of raids, intended to weaken and disrupt their (actual and potential) enemies. Phase Two was a full-scale invasion, intended to _annihilate_ them.

Only a small part of the fleet was visible, even with their superhuman perception. In total, it numbered in the trillions, containing enough cloned manpower and equipment to crush galaxies – several at once, in fact, which was of course what it had been designed for.

One might have wondered how the gods had managed to create such a force given the problems they had had with their powers, especially given that said problems increased exponentially with the magnitude of the crafting. The answer was simple – they hadn't. There were certain benefits to having a pet reality-warper, after all. With her universe thoroughly subdued, they had begun to test the limits of Haruhi Suzumiya's abilities, and so far she had not been found wanting. In fact, Tzintchi was beginning to suspect that with the correct applications, she would render their experiments on Bloodhaven entirely obsolete.

He gave a small, enigmatic smile – he'd been practicing of late, and was pretty sure he had it perfected. "Not bad. Give my regards to K.J. – for such a despicable little piece of offal, he does his job pretty well when he puts his mind to it. So what did you want me to go over?"

"Like I said, just a few little things. First off, when we hit the New Republic, are we going after the Yuuzhan Vong as well?"

"Might as well – can't have the situation there getting too stable, can we? In fact, we might want to go easy on them so both sides've still got enough firepower massed to blast each other back into the Stone Age. Admittedly, I'm not one hundred per cent sure the Vong ever _left_ it, but you get the picture. Next?"

"Well, we weren't entirely sure about the weapon loadouts for... wait, what's that?"

On the displays that floated around the Eye, something was moving. A thin spike of space-time distortions had emerged from the Integrated Data Entity's presumed location, slowly but steadily reaching out towards the parallel Earth that was the seat of their agents' power in the Suzumiyaverse.

"It appears that the Entity has commenced its attack," Reigle said, stating the obvious as only she could. "I shall order elements from the fleet to be deployed in its path – they may slow it down."

"Why are they moving _now_, though?" Asukhon asked. "How did they find out what we were doing? I think we'd have noticed if they'd just breezed through the camouflage we had set up."

"It could be an external factor," Mislaato pointed out. "The Divine Assassins were briefed on the complete plan, and we know you didn't get all of them in that purge of yours. I doubt _that_ little temper-tantrum particularly endeared you to the survivors, either – there's something about daemons coming after one's scalp that makes one seriously reconsider one's loyalties."

Perhaps his memory was failing him, but Tzintchi didn't recall the Goddess of Lust being quite so snarky in the past, and certainly not to her fellow deities. All things considered, he couldn't say he approved of the change.

"Rei," he said, refusing to let this sudden hindrance spoil his mood, "activate the sleeper code in their system. It's time to end this nonsense."

"Affirmative."

They watched with satisfaction as the god-computer convulsed, viruses seeded in it weeks before in preparation for precisely this eventuality activating and consuming it from within. The lance-like distortion lost coherence, whipping back and forth like a headless snake.

Tzintchi grinned. "And that, ladies, is why you should always have a plan B. Now, where were w-"

The Entity changed form again, in a rather more ordered and graceful manner this time.

"Asuka, what's it doing _now_?" the god demanded exasperatedly.

"It's isolating the infected sections and... and it's shedding them! Shinji, it's clean as a whistle under there! We didn't stop it at all!"

At the centre of the display, a pulse of energy winked on and off, sometimes long, sometimes short. As he realised what the Entity was doing, Tzintchi's jaw dropped.

"Is... is that _Morse code_?" he asked, incredulous.

"_Agents of Chaos_," Reigle translated, "_we bid you welcome, and hope that this means of communication is not beyond your admittedly limited technical aptitude. In the future, please think twice before attempting to hack a sentient computer. That is all_."

"Well," Mislaato said acerbically in the silence that followed, "do you have any _other_ backup plans up your sleeve, husband of mine?"

It took the beleaguered God of Ambition quite a while to reply. "Asuka, can we get in touch with the fleet? I want them to evacuate to the Warp _now_, if not sooner."

"That depends," she said slowly. "Do any of the clones we've got commanding that little lot speak Swahili?"

"_Swahili_? No, why would they need to?"

"Because that little message just now wasn't only a message. They used it to locate the means we were using to interact with their universe, and guess what language they encoded our comms into?"

"... Oh," Tzintchi said eloquently. "Is it... is it _good_ Swahili?"

"Hardly. In fact, it makes Babelfish look precise. I tried to send an evac order, and it ended up as something about gardening. Shinji, I do believe they've fucked us over good and proper."

He didn't reply, instead staring at the screen as the Entity's probe brushed through squadron after squadron of ships as if they weren't even there. _How? How did it all go so wrong so fast?_

* * *

Kyon Junior had decided that he didn't like the gods very much.

Yes, they had given him life, yes, they had introduced him to this wonderful playground of a universe, and yes, they were capable of things that made him weep with joy, and yet despite that, they were so very... limited.

_Consider, for instance, their treatment of my brother._ It should have been a turning point for them, someone to break not because he had done something sufficiently vile to deserve it, but simply because he was in their way. They didn't even have the benefit of distance, as they had with the various extradimensional civilisations they had subdued in their increasingly nebulously-defined quest – just one little high-school student entirely under their power who really needed a good brainwashing. K.J. had even offered a few suggestions.

What had followed was a thorough disappointment.

They had boasted to the wretch, offering justifications for what they were about to do in a transparent attempt to psych themselves up, and what they had done in the end hadn't been very impressive. A bit of rape here, a spot of torture there... so very pedestrian. Admittedly, employing crafted daemons in the guise of his friends had been a nice touch, but not really enough to make up for everything else. As for his cell, K.J. had seen worse five-star apartments. Sure, they could claim that it was intended to intimidate prospective prisoners with a display of power, but to the clone it felt more like an apology in architectural form. It wasn't even as if what they needed to do was all that hard. _Lock him in a sensory-deprivation tank, administer creatively-applied pain and humiliation at irregular intervals, and once he starts looking _forward _to the sessions outside, well... you've pretty much got him in the palm of your hand. Easy._

It had come as no surprise whatsoever when they let the worm escape, driving him into a place where his corruption would happen in its own sweet time and where they could forget about him as the work was done in their absence. Yes, it would most likely work – it certainly seemed to be doing so, judging by the reports K.J. occasionally filched from the Palace – but that did nothing to mitigate the gods' failure in his eyes. They were unworthy of the power they had been granted, incapable of using it to its full potential. Better that it had been given to someone with vision, someone who did not share their weaknesses. Like him, for instance.

The horrible, _demeaning_ name they had given him was just the icing on the cake.

He had a feeling that they didn't like him either. Understandable, really – being surpassed by an unpowered mostly-human was likely to cause a bit of resentment. He had no idea why he had not inherited his brother's supposed abilities – perhaps it was unrelated to genetics, perhaps the Warp had screwed things up (again), or perhaps the gods had just been typically careless and missed something out during his creation process. Whatever the case, it was a source of endless frustration for him, not least because it meant he was pretty much entirely dependent on that spoiled, self-centred brat Haruhi.

Corrupting her had been fun, at first. There was a very special thrill to conquering a being who could quite literally erase you with a thought. It hadn't been enough to convince her that she deserved the things he had done to her. The resentment and self-loathing would still build up, and could lash out in manners most inconvenient. No, professional ethics and gleeful sadism both demanded that he ensure she actively _wanted_ them – and him, of course. Turning someone into both an on-demand superweapon and your own personal plaything was no easy feat. He really should have demanded extra pay for multi-tasking.

Now, though, the game was over, and he was stuck with a useless sack of meat who just happened to be both the source of his power in this universe and his one bargaining chip with the gods. He had made quite sure during the corruption that he was the only one Haruhi properly responded to – in light of worsening employer relations, it was only sensible to take a few measures to ensure one kept one's job, especially when one knew that losing that job would likely result in one being dragged screaming to the Hall of Torments. As mentioned, the gods could be remarkably inventive when they thought you had it coming.

In fact, it was safe to say there weren't many people K.J. liked, and since people he _did_ like naturally resembled him as much as possible and sociopathic, megalomaniacal narcissists were not known for their teamwork abilities, most putative candidates ended up being quickly and quietly disposed of. Indeed, he'd run a few calculations back when they'd infiltrated the Integrated Data Entity, reasoning that such a trivial use of the mighty god-computer's processing power represented the perfect insult, and been surprised that his list of potential friends had an almost hundred-per-cent overlap with his list of potential threats who really, _really_ needed to die. It wasn't a problem most of the time, but it did mean that loyal flunkies were in shorter supply than he might have hoped for when, say, an irate Humanoid Interface with the entire might of the Entity backing her was chewing through an entire planet's worth of defences to get to him and the brain-dead little bitch of a reality-warper he kept around _specifically_ for situations like that was not even lifting a finger to help.

Not that he had a specific scenario in mind, of course. Oh no.

He sat back in his throne, a surprisingly comfortable affair comprised of the bones of various North High School students. Said bones were still attached to their original owners, most of whom were still alive. He was fond of the throne – it was a nice little memento of his earliest successes on this world. Screens hovered around him, carried by insect-like lesser daemons, and he saw that the Interface had finally arrived on the Earth's surface – more specifically, she was right outside his city-sized palace, disdainfully smacking aside entire legions of once-human guards with her force-fields as she forged her way towards the main entrance. At a gesture from its master, one of the screens zoomed in on her head, and he smiled slowly as he recognised her features.

"Yuki Nagato," he said across the palace's public-address system. "Long time no see."

She ignored him, instead squashing a Black Pharaoh that had got a little too close.

"You know, I thought they'd be sending you to do this," he continued. "Hell, I doubt they even had to give the order. Just set you loose, sat back, and watched the carnage. So why are you doing it, hmm? Not because the Entity asked you to, that's for sure. You've butted heads with it too many times in the past. How many of its programs did that thing purge when it was escaping the gods' infiltration? How many of them were your friends? Fun, isn't it, working for something that would mourn your loss no more than it would a bad case of dandruff?"

She was at the gates now, smashing through them with a wall of energy. The palace's defenders were waiting for her, though, and a barrage of projectiles boiled out from within, creating a forest of explosions that temporarily whited out the monitor.

"It's not Haruhi, either. I've seen how you Interfaces see her, more like some interesting natural phenomenon than anything else. I've been putting on a good show for you, haven't I? Is it getting a little bit stale? A bit moribund? I'd be happy to accept any criticisms and suggestions you have, of course – there's no need to take it so personally."

The shooting inside the lobby had stopped. K.J. knew the nature of his guards, and knew that the only way to stop them attacking was to stop them doing several other things as well, including but not limited to living. He looked closer at the display. _Or teleporting them half a continent away. That works too._

"Oh, I know!" he declared, slapping his forehead theatrically despite the fact that she almost certainly couldn't see it. "It's my brother, isn't it? Restoring his home, protecting the people he cares about... very noble. Very romantic. Come now, I have access to all his memories, even the ones he won't admit to. Did you think I was unaware of your silly little crush? Very well, let's assume that you get it done. That you kill me, rescue him, and everyone goes home happy. What exactly are you expecting in return? A couple of words of thanks, a request for help with whatever idiocy Suzumiya's landed you all in this time, and then straight back to mooning over that airbag Asahina. You're a tool, Nagato. A useful resource. Nothing more, nothing less."

One of the screens now showed a map of the palace, with compromised sectors marked in red. There were quite a few of them, marking a trail pointed straight at the throne room. The building's outer layers had been built as a maze that he had calculated would take prospective invaders several days to navigate – not that they'd _have_ that long before Haruhi erased them. The Interface, on the other hand, seemed to be blasting straight through it. _Some people just have no respect for household convention._

"Me, on the other hand? I'd be happy to oblige. Sure, you're a bit underdeveloped for my tastes, but new concubines are always welcome. Hell, I'd even give you the full Haruhi treatment, and you can't say better than that, right? I mean, sure, it's not like you're likely to _enjoy_ it, but you still get to be fucked by a Kyon or alternate-manufacturer equivalent, and that's what really matters, yes?"

Her lack of reaction was beginning to unnerve – no, that wasn't the right word, too strong – _disconcert_ him. He signalled one of his servant-daemons to head by Haruhi's quarters and kick her awake. _Seriously, what's _keeping _her?_

"You know, you can kill me if you want. I bet you've got a whole lot bottled up in that pretty little head of yours – spot of catharsis would do you a world of good. I hope you don't think it's going to make a lasting difference, though. I've left my mark, Nagato. My legacy is carved in the very bones of this planet, in the very hearts of its people. They'll remember me, you see, and as long as my name is spoken with the fear and loathing I've given them, I'll still be here. I'll still be here watching you deluded little machines scurry around, laughing as you try vainly to pick up the pieces. I'm not afraid of death, Nagato. I know it's not the end for me."

Another red light. She was right outside the throne room's door. _I'm not scared. I'm not._

"What do you feel, Nagato? What's behind that mask of yours? Fear? Anger? Grief? Hatred? A desire for vengeance? What is it? TELL ME!"

The last sentence was barely coherent, a screaming, desperate plea. Warmth streaked his cheeks, and he realised dimly that he was crying.

Yuki Nagato materialised in front of him, her eyes gazing into his. In a quiet, calm voice, she spoke.

"Only contempt."

She raised her hands, chanting in the bizarre machine-language of the Interfaces, and the clone called Kyon Junior simply disappeared from existence, his panicked appeal for mercy still unspoken, along with the throne, the monitors, and a good portion of the floor.

It was a quick death, but not a painless one.

* * *

Yuki walked through the palace, inspecting the decor as she went. She could have teleported to her desired location, but there was something about this place that demanded one's attention. In fact, she was fairly sure that that was its sole purpose. Half the furniture was comprised of bits of dead human, all neatly labelled with their former owners' names, lifespans, and causes of death.

A curtain of skin covering a window, its label stitched to it with black thread:

_Grace Sinclair_

_1989-2011_

_Exsanguination_

An appropriately bone-white brick in the wall, its gleaming, pearlescent surface marred by three carefully-carved lines:

_Chow Ying-sun_

_1948-2011_

_Starvation_

A soft leather cushion, offset by the clean white label attached to one corner:

_Pyotr Simonovich Raikov_

_2004-2011_

_Poisoning_

When she had been released from the Data Integration Thought Entity's storage vaults to liberate Earth, Yuki had thought the palace of its regent rather clichéd and unoriginal, a brooding, gothic affair straight out of the cheap horror stories she read when no other literary entertainment presented itself. Now, though, she realised that that was precisely its intent, its surreal, more-fiction-than-fiction nature deliberately designed to sear it into observers' brains with the power of a waking nightmare. It was a monument to pain, to death, to atrocity, and to the creature that had made them happen.

It was as he himself had said – he had known that he was not long for the world whatever the outcome of his mission, and had endeavoured to secure some measure of immortality in the only way he knew how. If the results hadn't been so horrific, she might have almost felt sorry for him.

Then she opened the door to Haruhi's cell, and everything even resembling sympathy vanished for good.

It was pretty much impossible to recognise the thing huddled in the corner of the room as the self-proclaimed leader of the SOS Brigade. In fact, it was only thanks to Yuki's abilities as a Humanoid Interface that it was reliably recognisable as human.

Most of it was hidden beneath tangled, matted hair and ragged clothing, and those parts that were not were caked in filth and covered in wounds, some of them very obviously self-inflicted. It raised its head, regarding her with a flat, incurious gaze that made her skin crawl in a manner entirely too human to be within Entity regulations.

Back while she had been a member of the Brigade, Yuki and Haruhi had not got along well. It wasn't that they had got along _badly_, mind – just that their radically different personalities ensured little real interaction. The Interface had always been faintly irritated by the reality-warper's relentless hyperactivity and cheerful irresponsibility, whilst Haruhi, for her part, had tended to treat Yuki like an item of furniture when she remembered she existed at all. Nevertheless, it was precisely those aspects of Haruhi's personality that had once so annoyed her that made her current state all the worse. To see such a lively, carefree girl reduced to... to _this_ was an obscenity, plain and simple.

It was obvious, now, why she had not moved to stop the Entity's attack. It wasn't a case of rebellion, a final betrayal of the one who had enslaved her. It was because she simply _couldn't_. Haruhi Suzumiya was little more than a shell, a creature with all the self-determination and free will of a corpse. Kyon Junior had used her as best he could – it had never occurred to him that it was possible to use her _up_.

Yuki moved forward, lightly pressing her fingertips into Haruhi's forehead, and began her final task of the day.

The power of the Interfaces – the ability to manipulate data – was one whose true importance didn't really become apparent until you took into account certain facts – most significantly, that it was never really specified which _kind_ of data they could manipulate. Sooner or later, everything boiled down to statistics. Suppose, for instance, that you wanted to summon a quick fireball. A Mid-type mage like the ones in the Bureau would reel off some nonsensical incantation to sculpt raw magic into something that _resembled_ fire, but had lots of weird supernatural quirks and disadvantages. An Interface, on the other hand, would just crank up the air temperature _here_, inject a bit of kinetic energy _here_, and then sit back and watch the fireworks both literal and metaphorical.

There were limitations, of course. The larger and more complex the manipulation, the more processing power was required, and the Entity, like all computers, only had so much to go around. The trick was deciding exactly what you needed to alter in order to achieve the desired effect with the minimum of effort, and it was one Yuki was very good at.

Fact one: in the universe that was the home of Haruhi Suzumiya, solipsism was more than a mere philosophical conceit. It could safely be theorised that just about everything that existed in there was a figment of the young reality-warper's boundless imagination given physical form and complexity by her powers. There was a _reason_ the various organisations observing Haruhi considered keeping her in the dark about her true nature so important.

Fact two: the human (or metahuman) brain was essentially a rather inefficient organic computer. The Interfaces were _good_ with computers.

With these two facts in mind, Yuki accessed Haruhi's mind and started erasing her memories.

It wasn't as easy as she had expected – things branched off in strange ways in there, and some sections seemed to be entirely locked away, making it extremely difficult to deduce cause and effect. She couldn't simply set apart everything dated after the real Kyon's disappearance and delete it – Haruhi's brain just wasn't organised that neatly. Instead, she had to carefully analyse each packet of information, figure out how it related to everything else, and _then_ get rid of it... which led to another problem entirely.

The entire purpose of an Interface in ordinary circumstances was to observe and record. Among other things, this meant that they couldn't forget anything they saw. Anything. Consequently, one side-effect of the erasure was that every single thing the clone had done to Haruhi was permanently burned into her own brain.

Though digestive systems were strictly optional for beings such as herself, Yuki suddenly felt a pressing need to vomit. She then ran a few calculations regarding whether or not the opportunity still existed to travel back in time and erase K.J. again (and much more painfully this time), and was rather disappointed to find that it didn't.

Eventually, it was done. She opened her eyes, and took in her surroundings. They were in the middle of a suburban street, with the sun shining down on them and people walking past. A quick scan of the immediate landscape confirmed that they were on the outskirts of Nishinomiya City, whilst her internal chronometer confirmed that it was 9:25 on a Monday morning. If flocks of daemons, ambulatory architecture, or evil towers of ominousness dominating the horizon were in residence, they had not yet made themselves known to her.

Though nobody in the crowds on either side of them had yet stopped to take photographs of one attractive young girl in a school uniform holding another unconscious one in her arms in the middle of the road, it was only a matter of time, knowing _this_ neighbourhood. A quick step sideways into closed space soon put paid to that eventuality – though Yuki was not too worried about others misinterpreting her actions (she knew the truth, and that was generally enough except in very particular situations involving a certain floppy-haired, cynical student), being at the centre of attention was something she greatly disliked.

Now that any potential distractions had been removed, she took the opportunity to examine Haruhi. She certainly looked a lot healthier post-erasure – in fact, she looked exactly as she had prior to the Canada trip. The next question, of course, was whether she had recovered mentally as well.

The president of the SOS Brigade's eyes snapped open. "Nagato, where am I, how did I get here, and whyareyougropingmeyouPERVERT?"

Belatedly, Yuki realised that the way in which she was carrying the taller girl, whilst ergonomically efficient, was not entirely within the bounds of human decency. Sometimes, she really wished the Entity's files on Earth social mores had been just a little more comprehensive. On the plus side, at least her question had been answered. _0 to incandescent in 3.6 seconds. That would be a 'yes', then._

Haruhi, meanwhile, had got to her feet with commendable speed. "Didn't you hear me? You are going to explain yourself _right now_ or I'll... zzzzzZZZZZ..."

Yuki caught her before she hit the ground, and initiated a short-range teleport. She had never visited Haruhi's house herself – none of the Brigade had – but her former backup unit, Ryoko Asakura, had mapped out the area to a frankly worrying extent, and the files, as always, were stored on the Entity's memory banks.

They materialised inside the reality warper's room, and the Interface set her down on the bed – _white sheets with a teddy-bear print – how had Asakura known that? _– before notifying the school that one of their students would be off sick for a few days. With luck, it would buy everyone else enough time to organise a makeshift observation routine until the war was over. There was the potential issue of Haruhi's parents, but given the extent of her antics that they had thus far either permitted or failed to notice, having their daughter sleep for a day or so would probably not concern them unduly. In fact, they might appreciate the peace and quiet.

After a few moments' thought, she deposited one of the larger gift boxes from Nishinomiya's most expensive chocolatier on the sleeping girl's bedside table, making a mental note to transfer the appropriate amount of cash to the store when the opportunity arose. Even if (as she hoped) Haruhi couldn't remember anything of what had happened to her, Yuki _did_, and it was her considered opinion that some measure of compensation was in order. It wasn't enough, not by any means, but she doubted anything ever would be.

Her last teleport of the day was to North High School. Though classes had already started, students were still scuttling back and forth between the buildings. She watched them for a little while, fading into the background as always. It was truly bizarre to think that less than an hour ago this place had been buried under the twisted domicile of an insane tyrant, and that absolutely no-one knew.

Except her.

Perhaps K.J. had known what would happen, had ensured that the one to destroy him would be someone capable of always remembering him and his works. It would certainly have explained why he never tried to flee when she came for him. Had it been enough, in the end? Had he died satisfied at his final gambit? She recalled the look of pure animal terror on his face during his final moments. _Probably not._ Though she was sure her superiors would have frowned on such vindictiveness, seeing it as a sign of dangerous partiality, this gave her no little satisfaction.

They still had a great deal to do. Depriving Chaos of the Suzumiyaverse represented a tremendous setback to them, but they still had other forces, other strongholds, and they would not be so easily caught off-guard next time. Nevertheless, it was a victory, a chance for the allied universes to lick their wounds and prepare their counterattack, and she really should have felt more proud of herself for being so instrumental to it, even if she had only acted as an extension of the Entity's will.

Something still nagged, though. Deductive reasoning and logic were both very useful, but veteran Interfaces soon learned to trust their intuition, and Yuki knew when something was too good to be true. She'd known it when her dangerously unstable backup had given an apparent love letter to a nice young man recently dunked up to his eyeballs in supernatural weirdness, inviting him to come alone to an empty classroom, and she knew it now.

It was not until she checked the Entity's records on population distribution that she found out what it was. It was not until she checked the astronomical charts that she found out how _bad_ it was.

* * *

Tzintchi looked out through the Eye's myriad Warp-attuned sensor systems in horrified incredulity. They had lost the Suzumiyaverse. They had lost their fleet. They had lost any chance of a swift end to the conflict. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, they had lost the opportunity to make that little _shit_ Kyon Junior answer for his failures.

"Well," he announced to the multiverse in general and his fellow gods in particular, "that's what happens when you rely on subcontractors to do your work for you. See what information you can gather on the Entity's capabilities – being made to look like an idiot by a glorified abacus is _not_ something I wish to repeat. From now on, ladies, we are doing things _our_ way."

_Of course,_ he reflected glumly, '_doing things our way' is going to have to wait a while._ They still had the Stargate program, Reigle's little project in the Palace sewers, and the opportunity to assemble a new fleet (using their _own_ power this time), but all three would need a little while to get ready, and in the meantime they would be on the defensive, taking their lumps from several irate galactic civilisations at once. Needless to say, he was not looking forward to it.

_We had it all planned out. Explore a few neighbouring universes, raid them for arms and manpower, blast the C'tan into their component atoms, and then settle down back on Earth with our followers. Just what in the name of the seven hells _happened_?_

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Oh, you thought I was kidding about the weaponised Swahili when I mentioned it in the summary on my profile, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?

Anyways, welcome back to the madness once more. It has come to my attention whilst re-reading that there's a disproportionate amount of torture and general prisoner abuse in this story so far, often of teenagers, and I swear that this is not going to become a thing. Well, not much of a thing. My mother reads this, after all. Yes, really.

Incidentally, here's hoping I did Yuki's character justice. Always struck me as the type with a lot going on inside her head, that one.


	29. Management Lessons

**28. Management Lessons**

To say that the New Republic had had a busy month would have been to face criminal charges for premeditated and malicious understatement. The Yuuzhan Vong invasion would have been bad enough on its own, but with the Republic's military crippled and its government decapitated by the Chaos infiltrators, it was by several orders of magnitude the worst crisis that had faced the galaxy in living memory – and there were sentients there who had lived for a _very_ long time.

With Ponc Gavrisom dead, the obvious choice to replace him as Chief of State would have been the woman he supplanted during her hiatus from political activities, Leia Organa Solo. Unfortunately, they had lost contact with the sector she had been visiting along with her family during the initial strikes, and whilst Luke wasn't too concerned about his sister's fate – if all they'd been through so far hadn't killed them, he highly doubted a massive alien invasion would do the job – this did mean that a massive power vacuum at the heart of the political sphere still existed. It had been filled, of course, but not in a way he was entirely pleased with.

Borsk Fey'lya had won a great deal of acclaim for his actions during the attack on the Grand Convocation Chamber – even discounting the exaggerations and urban legends that had appeared in the aftermath, his decisive leadership during the evacuation had undoubtedly saved a great many lives. When one factored in the relatively large percentage of his supporters among the survivors, his inauguration as Acting Chief was almost inevitable. In fact, there were a few ugly rumours floating around that suggested that last fact might not have been entirely coincidence, though this was not a theory that Luke personally agreed with. The attack had been far too sudden and unpredictable for anything requiring that level of organisation to have taken place, and for all his oft-proclaimed mastery of realpolitik, Fey'lya just wasn't a good enough actor for that expression of utter horrified astonishment he'd worn when that assassin had made its presence known to have been anything other than genuine. The Jedi had _felt_ the fear bleeding off him.

Even if he had suspected such an occurrence, though, what he saw when he entered the Presidential Office would have swiftly put paid to it.

There were many terms that could be used to describe the Bothan politician. 'Confident', if one wanted to be polite. 'Smug', if one didn't. 'Oleaginous', if one wanted to be actively insulting and had access to a thesaurus. 'Utterly defeated', on the other hand, was rather a new one.

His eyes were red. His suit was rumpled. His fur was dull and unwashed. If Luke had been so inclined, he imagined that he could have scanned the room's atmosphere and found traces of more than one heavy-duty intoxicant tailored to work on Fey'lya's species. He looked, in short, like someone who had attained his life's ambition at the precise point at which it had suddenly turned to ashes... which was appropriate, really, seeing as that was exactly what had happened.

"We just lost the Ithor system," the Bothan said without preamble. "Only three defence lines remain between them and Coruscant. So why did you want this meeting, Skywalker? To gloat over my failures? Some clever little riff on that speech I was giving just before the invasion? I hear those are quite popular with the media these days. Who always picks the wrong side? Borsk. Who is the unreliable paranoid? Borsk. Who is more interested in his own standing than the wellbeing of the Republic? Borsk. And now, joy of joys, he's in charge during the Republic's biggest crisis. We may as well surrender right now, mmm?" He looked blearily at his guest. "Is that what you were going to say?"

Luke briefly considered beating some sense into the political leader of the Republic, before dismissing it as counterproductive. The field tests of Master Breet Noh's Pacification Fist technique would have to wait.

"Actually, no," he replied instead, as if to one of his students back at the Praxeum. "In fact, I think you made some fairly sensible arguments during that speech. We _were_ taking a lot on faith, for a start. You weren't wrong because of any personal failing, Mr. President – we simply had not encountered a threat of this nature before. Misjudging the completely unknown is nothing to be ashamed of – the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, for instance, managed to catch the entire galaxy off-guard. We're _still_ having to re-evaluate accepted strategy against them."

Fey'lya chuckled bitterly, indicating the paperwork littering his desk. "Tell me something I _don't_ know."

"Besides," Luke continued in the same calm, reassuring tone, "we need some debate here and there. We wouldn't be a functioning democracy otherwise. Just because I don't agree with your opinions most of the time doesn't mean I can't respect them – after all, there's nothing like having a devil's advocate around to shore up holes in your plans."

The Bothan still looked sceptical, but slightly mollified nonetheless. "So my entire worth to the Republic is as an unconscious devil's advocate? I'm touched. Very well, if you didn't come to _intentionally_ insult me, what was the actual reason?"

"Simple, really. As the leader of the Jedi Order, such as it is, I wanted to officially pledge my support and offer any assistance available during this crisis." Keeping a depressed, angry, and very, very drunk Chief of State this side of sanity had not been on the schedule, but Luke prided himself in a thoroughly unpridelike manner (a piece of bizarre mental judo only a Jedi could or would want to manage) on his willingness to adapt.

This eventuality was not entirely unforeseen – ever since Bothan politicians had started using psychiatrists to gather intelligence on their rivals (a practice started, ironically, by Fey'lya himself), those interested in such matters had started taking bets on which paranoid, therapy-deprived celebrity from that species was going to have a spectacular public breakdown first. Luke did wish, though, that it had been someone slightly less integral to the galaxy's continued functioning.

Fey'lya waved a hand dismissively, almost knocking over a holoprojector in the process. "Oh, _formalities_. I see. Fine, fine, you've made your point, Skywalker. Now go back to figuring out how you can capitalise on my downfall, there's a good human. Try to get it done _before_ the Vong turn up on the doorstep, won't you?"

_I will not be annoyed. Annoyance leads to anger... anger leads to hate... hate leads to suffering..._ "Perhaps you fail to understand, Mr. President. _I want to help you_."

Fey'lya stared at him, his gaze disconcertingly level. "Why?"

"Because you're the leader of a galaxy in crisis. I could go on about how a Jedi does not pursue personal ambition or let emotion compromise reason, but I won't. The Republic stands on the cusp of annihilation. To further mire it in political dispute now would not merely be unthinkable to a Jedi, but to any adequately-functioning sentient."

The stare continued. "You may not be aware of this, Skywalker, but reports from Intelligence indicate that there are no less than three separate coups being planned against me by different Senatorial factions."

There was a moment's silence. "... I stand by my earlier comments."

Fey'lya barked a laugh, dispelling much of the tension. "So what assistance should I expect? Omens? Palliative animal sacrifices?"

"Mostly, I intended to send my students and myself in to assist at major hotspots in our remaining defence lines, but I recognise that our lack of numbers would ensure that we contributed little in such situations. I have been training them in astral projection, though, perceiving the universe through the Force, and several of them have shown considerable aptitude there. We could track enemy fleet movements with a high degree of accuracy, in addition to bolstering our communications network." He allowed himself a rare, mischievous smile. "That said, we could always cut open a bantha or two on your desk as well if you _really_ want."

By now, Fey'lya was smiling as well, though Luke suspected that he would not appreciate discovering this. "I may hold you to that, Skywalker. One can't be too careful, after all. Was there anything else?"

Luke chose his words carefully, very aware that he walked on treacherous ground. "Ah... may I offer some personal advice?"

The Bothan frowned in distaste, but gave a short nod nonetheless. "Once. Make it good."

"We both know you have a difficult job here," he said, drawing another bitter laugh. "I know a few things about pressure, and I know one of the best ways to deal with it is to talk to someone else about it. Find someone you trust, Mr. President. You'll thank me for it."

To the Jedi's astonishment, Fey'lya actually seemed to consider it for a moment. "Fair enough. Get in contact with Ackbar – I suspect he'll want a full evaluation of the Temple's assets. Given that nice little speech you just made about cooperation in the face of adversity, I'd advise that you not hold anything back."

"Of course, Mr. President," Luke replied politely, accurately translating this as the Borsk equivalent of a farewell.

As he turned to leave, he saw Fey'lya hold up a hand in the universal 'wait a second' gesture.

"Ah... Skywalker, you _are_ aware that I see you as a sanctimonious, superstitious demagogue, not to mention a dangerously disruptive influence upon the Republic as a whole?"

"Just as I see you as grasping, self-serving, and a walking demonstration of the worst excesses of narrow-minded xenophobia and soulless ambition? Yes."

The Chief of State looked infinitely relieved. "Oh, good. Just wanted to be sure."

Luke left the office considerably more sanguine about the future of the Republic than when he had entered it, and yet had no idea why. The fact that his Force-enhanced vision had shown Fey'lya discreetly tossing a small black bottle into the waste-disposal chute as he walked out might have had something to do with it, though.

* * *

The problem, Borsk reflected, was not a lack of willingness to do his job. One of his central goals in life had always been to ensure the wellbeing of his species, and in this situation, this meant ensuring the wellbeing of the Republic. It was a lack of _ability_.

Throughout his political career he had specialised in power-brokering, using what others wanted to get what _he_ wanted. Unfortunately, he already _had_ most of the galaxy's resources at his disposal – even Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant had pledged his support – and they were _still_ losing. Worse, the Vong apparently wanted little more than the reduction of every world in the Republic to a smoking cinder, and there really wasn't much leeway you could obtain from that.

_So what other factions are in play? Ah. Of course._

He turned on the holoprojector and placed a call to his secretary, a young Bothan by the glottis-mauling name of Ekar Tre'lak who he had retained from his senatorial days. Though he was sure that selecting someone from one of the more marketable minority species for the job would have been better from a public-relations perspective, he always preferred to work with what he knew.

"Miss Tre'lak, can you contact the research and development division, please? Ask them to recommence work on the Spiral Driver project. ...Yes, yes, I _know_ I said it needed to be terminated. ...No, they still haven't figured out a way to deal with the side-effects, at least as far as I know. Just trust me on this, would you? ...Excellent, thank you. And if you could get in touch with the ambassador for the Time-Space Administration Bureau as well, I'd greatly appreciate it. Tell her I wish to discuss a new trade agreement."

He paused a moment, rubbing his long muzzle pensively as he recalled Luke Skywalker's words.

"One other thing. How long have you worked under me now? ...Really? Good grief. Perhaps some form of reward would be in order, and besides, I think I need a break from the workload before it drives me slowly insane. I know of a rather nice little restaurant in the Ambassadorial District, and was wondering if you'd care to join me there for dinner tomorrow – assuming, of course, you have no prior engagements? ...Excellent. I'll book a table."

As he ended the call, Borsk realised that this was quite possibly the first time he had invited one of his secretaries out for a meal without the express goal of starting an illicit affair with her. _Well, this should prove interesting._

He sat back to await the Bureau ambassador's reply, and the resultant meeting that might well change the course of the conflict. There was nothing quite like being able to _act_ for once to put one in a good mood. Now, if only he could remember where he'd put that brandy...

Beside him, the chute processed its hideously expensive contents with the same mechanical disinterest it reserved for everything else.

* * *

Rossiu was not unused to pain.

Much of it was unintentional on his part, a legacy of a hard-fought life. He still remembered the ache of the wounds inflicted during his brief career as _Gurren_'s pilot, the numbing shock across his jaw when Simon had saved him from the depths of despair, and the razor-fine agony when a suicide bomber had expressed his considerable annoyance at the government's continued, institutionalised inaction re: the voices in his head. More recently, there were the curious, phantom twinges that still speared out from his new mechanical arm's elbow despite the complete lack of any sort of nervous system in the general vicinity.

Some, though, was self-inflicted, such as the very personal, private pain he had developed a habit of subjecting himself to in his spare time, reading through the eulogies, epitaphs, and obituaries of the billions who had died in the Chaos attack. He was not a masochist, and he did not believe that it constituted any form of atonement – he had atoned in the past, and knew that it tended to be rather more involved than simply remembering the dead. For the President of the Spiral Nation, this ritual was simply a necessary duty. It was far too easy, he knew, to see his citizens as statistics, numbers on a graph that one could spend like any other resource. Some measure of perspective was required, a reminder that each of those numbers represented a _person_. So it was that he read through the endless lists of the departed, and grieved for their loss.

There was a soft knock at the door, and he looked up, smiling, as Kinon walked in. During the decades of his incumbency, the fact that his presidential aide was also his wife had gone from minor scandal to simple fact of life. She was, and it didn't stop her from being very good at her job. That was all there was to it, really.

"I have the latest reports on the situation of our military here," she explained, indicating the vast stack of paperwork in her arms. "Our Grappal forces are halved, our fleet has been reduced to a tenth of its original strength, and the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ is still not operational. We have lost contact with eighteen systems due to interference from what our allies refer to as the Warp, and one hundred and sixty-four major military outposts are known to be completely wiped out, not to mention several thousand minor ones. In addition, civilian casualty patterns show that a disproportional amount of those who died possessed the high concentration of Spiral Energy that would have marked them as potential Ganmen pilots, though given the random nature of the killings, we don't know whether this was deliberate or not. Correlation does not guarantee causation, after all. Estimations on how long it will be before we can properly mobilise our forces again range from two months to six, given the comprehensive dismantling of our command structure."

Rossiu winced. He'd known it would be bad, but this was worse than he'd thought. The rebuilding of their military would clearly need to involve a good, long look at their tactical and strategic doctrine. Whoever had decided upon the genius idea of having a single, gigantic battleship pilotable by only one in every few billion people comprise ninety per cent of their naval firepower was going to get a serious yelling-at, too.

"And the _good_ news?"

She managed a wan smile and set the stack on his desk, where it teetered precariously. "Fortunately, there is some. First off, Spiral Energy's known ability to make a mockery of statistics may halve that figure on the mobilisation. Second, our industrial capacity was relatively unharmed, and Leeron's 'Spiral Driver' system has gone into full mass-production. Even if we can offer the Bureau and their friends limited direct assistance for the moment, we can at least arm them properly. I also took the liberty of sending them one of the Space Grappal regiments uninvolved in maintaining order over here, which should give them an edge in the initial counterattack."

"Good decision. And the civilians?"

"Casualties were heavy, but you already know that. Reconstruction of those urban areas damaged in the attack is going well on most planets affected, though, and citizen morale remains high. They just want to get back at the... _people_ who did this to them." Her eyes flashed behind her glasses. "Believe me, they aren't the only ones."

He reached out an arm and stroked her hair reassuringly, drawing a rather more genuine smile this time. "What's the status of the emergency report?"

"Ready to air when you give the word." Her lip curled in disgust. "Uriah wanted to adjust the footage for extra emotional impact, as tailored to their known psychological profiles. Demolished schools, victims cherry-picked for their resemblance to... certain figures, that sort of thing. I shot him down as soon as I heard about it. It'll be going out clean. I presume that was the right decision?"

Rossiu sighed. "Do you really have to ask? What happened is enough. They'll come anyway, and I have no intention of lying to them any more than I have in the past – especially not in such a tasteless manner. Honestly, I can never be sure that man remembers what sort of government he's working for. Remind me to get a new PR specialist once this is over, will you?"

Kinon tugged a sheet of paper from the middle of the pile and flourished it triumphantly. "Already formulated a list. The asterisk-marked companies are known for their integrity and ethical standards – I thought you'd be especially interested in those, given how scarce such qualities are in the business."

He chuckled in a quite unstatesmanly manner, and drew her down for a kiss. "Whatever would I do without you?"

"Still be the most eligible bachelor in New Kamina City?" she asked, her eyes dancing playfully.

She would never have flirted with him like that twenty years ago, he reflected some time later. She had always been so serious, so very earnest about making a better world. For that matter, so had he – well, he still was, but that was no excuse for not retaining a sense of humour. It was amazing how people could change, really.

Two faces appeared before his mind's eye. Hopefully, _they_ hadn't changed too much.

* * *

Karrast Six was on the very frontiers of Spiral Nation territory, a recently-colonised world that was expected by the corporations responsible to be a very lucrative investment thanks to both its considerable natural resources and even more considerable natural beauty. The tourists had not yet arrived, though, and neither had the major mining interests. Instead, most of the planet's population consisted of small, hardy groups of cartographers, prospectors, and scientists, dedicated to mapping out the planet and making a quick buck in the process.

One such team was camped out in the mountain range designated VX-1274, a spectacular forest of snow-capped peaks, plunging, green-walled gorges, and distant, glittering waterfalls that in no way deserved such a brutally prosaic name. In fact, some of the more poetically-inclined explorers were already trying to come up with a better one.

It was evening, the camp illuminated by a daisy-chain of electric lights, and everyone was gathered around the holographic viewer in the main tent. Sometimes one of them would curse incredulously, or stare at the display in silent paralysis as the studio reporter outlined exactly what had happened to their civilisation in their absence. One couple held each other and wept, whilst another carefully avoided each other's eyes.

Halfway through, one of the guides, a large, taciturn man known to the others at the camp only as 'Old Si', got up and walked out of the tent. He packed up his few possessions and flew away aboard one of the team's two clapped-out Ganmen, not even saying a single goodbye. The ancient mech returned the next day on autopilot, homing in on the camp's uplink tower, but its cockpit was empty of both the guide and his strange little pet.

Nobody was able to come up with an adequate explanation for the man's sudden disappearance, but that was hardly unusual. He had always been something of an enigma, offering no explanation for his presence on the expedition, and it only made sense that his final removal from their lives would be in a similarly uninformative vein. A few suggested waiting for him for a couple of days, pointing out that he had been a useful member of the team despite his oddities, but the time passed without him reappearing and the camp moved on.

Their last act whilst in the vicinity of VX-1274 was to ceremonially pour a bottle of alcohol onto the rocky side of one of the range's outermost foothills, offering a simple benediction to those suffering so far away.

* * *

The Littner Memorial Academy was widely considered one of the finest primary schools on the planet, with tens of thousands of applicants per year and a collection of awards that could have easily covered every wall of its sports hall – a particularly impressive feat given that said hall was a repurposed Ganmen hangar from the War of Liberation, found buried beneath the island. Though she would surely have protested otherwise, everyone knew that this was largely due to the efforts of the school's founder and headmistress, Miss Yomako. They might have been surprised, therefore, to learn that two days after the news broadcast, she was preparing to leave.

It was not as hard as she had expected. She'd been training her young deputy Sumeragi well, and was confident that she could take over in her absence. In fact, she wondered if she had been doing so in case exactly this eventuality would occur. _That_ train of thought was quickly abandoned – she'd never been very fond of introspection. There was no telling what she might find.

Whatever the case, the end result was that at the end of a busy day balancing the school's books and talking to prospective parents, she found herself booking a place on a private orbital shuttle, carrying a long suitcase under her arm that contained several large metallic objects that might have caused anyone who saw them to wonder exactly what classroom discipline at her school entailed. Twenty minutes later, she had begun the first leg of the weeks-long voyage to Naval Command in the Iolaus system.

Considering her fame and the length of her career at the Academy, she had had remarkably few goodbyes to make, but she dismissed this as irrelevant as well. The Spiral Nation needed her, and that was all that mattered.

Absent-mindedly, she tucked up her hair with a skull-shaped clip.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yes, Gurren Lagann fans, those people in the last two sections were _exactly_ who you thought they were. Not that I really bothered concealing it, mind. You may commence rejoicing... now.

In case you hadn't noticed by now, it is my mission to give most of the (expansive) cast in this a moment of sympathy, a moment of badassery, or both, and yes, that includes Senator Fey'lya. The guy may be faced with the unenviable task of having to do some serious growing-up over halfway through his life, but someone who possesses the bounce-back rate he does in the EU can't be wholly incompetent, right?

See you next week!


	30. Career Prospects

**29. Career Prospects**

They called her Gina.

It was apparently some sort of pop-culture reference, originally applied to her by one of the Earthborn (and wasn't _that_ a surreal thought?) part-timers working at the prison. Given the context, she rather suspected that the original Gina, whoever she was, had been a fairly unfortunate soul, but the assassin herself had nevertheless been doing fairly well of late.

The staff had rallied round her, their outrage at the attack on their inmates overruling animosity to the point where she wasn't entirely sure whether she qualified as a prisoner or a mascot – though she suspected that she would have found out _very_ quickly if she ever tried to escape. In return, she had started eating and drinking again, reasoning that since the prospect of her former employers actually managing to drag her away for her scheduled fate worse than death was seeming increasingly unlikely, pre-emptive suicide was not quite such an attractive prospect. Admittedly, she had no idea what she was going to do from now on (other than lounging around in her cell for the foreseeable future), but it always paid to keep one's options open.

As if on cue, the cell door opened and two combat mages walked in. Both wore the bizarre mishmashes of clothing the Bureau referred to as 'Barrier Jackets', which stopped looking quite so daft once you realised they could shrug off anti-tank rounds, and both were armed with what could only be Devices. The sour-faced redhead held a grotesquely oversized pistol one-handed in a classic 'this isn't pointed at you but it very soon could be' stance, whilst her slightly shorter companion, who appeared to be against all probability a natural blue, gave her a cheery wave with a bulky, gear-wristed gauntlet. Both of them looked like they were no older than their late teens, but then again, so was Gina, and it hadn't presented _her_ with much of a problem ability-wise.

She raised her eyebrows. "An armed escort? I'm flattered. Was wondering when you'd get to the interrogation – for people with such an elaborate detention system, you're _really_ slow when it comes to processing your prisoners."

The blue-haired girl waved a hand airily. "Oh, you don't need to worry about that. Inspector Acous already took the information from inside your head – it saved quite a lot of lives, actually. Thanks!"

Gina stared at the mage, her empathic senses searching for the slightest hint of mockery or sarcasm... and found absolutely nothing. _Good grief._

"So why did you come?" she asked, struggling to conceal her shock at this apparent, unremembered violation. "Have I outlived my usefulness? Seriously, I'm an agent of Chaos – well, I _was_, anyway – who's gone for weeks without clichéd villain dialogue. A girl's got needs, you know."

Blue-hair looked genuinely appalled. "No, no, it's nothing like that! It's just that you've been listed by the detention centre psychologists as 'having a low potential recidivism rate' – which I think means that whatever you did, you're not likely to do it again. Is that right, Tea?" The redhead responded with an affirmative grunt, and she smiled sheepishly. "Sorry, Tea's the smart one. Anyway, we thought that seeing as there wasn't really much point for any of us in you being cooped up here forever, we might as well let you know about what other options there are. Well, the chief warder thought that. Not me."

"Still volunteered for it, though," Tea pointed out. "Anything to get in Captain Takamachi's good books, right?"

"So why did you come along then, Tea?" Just as before, there was no malice to the question – merely honest curiosity.

For a moment, the colour of the other mage's face matched her hair. "Well, isn't it obvious? _Someone_ had to keep an eye on you, Subaru, or the entire central office would be neck-deep in escaped prisoners. Honestly, I can't leave you alone for five minutes..."

_So tell me, 'Tea', do you have difficulties with crocodiles? See pyramids from time to time?_ "And what make you think I'm not going to turn on you lot, then?"

The redhead shrugged. "Where's the motive? I think it's fairly obvious that your masters don't want you back except in bite-sized chunks, and your psychological profile doesn't indicate serial-killer tendencies – I'll admit that surprised me at first, but I suppose there's no sense in an infiltrator giving themselves away like that."

"Well, yes, that's part of it," Gina admitted. "The other half was that we had to eat those whose identities we stole in order for our bodies to perfectly mimic their physical structure – helped with disposing of evidence, too – and I never really liked the taste. Sort of puts you off casual homicide, you know. Negative stimuli and all that."

Their joint expressions were so very, _very_ worth it. "Hey, you said you read my psych-eval; I'd assume that was mentioned."

"You know," Tea said eventually, "if you're ever going to get rehabilitated, you _need_ to understand the concept of 'too much information'. Anyway, assuming that the powers that be weren't employing rectum-based verbal communication when they did your file, the only way you're likely to cause us trouble is if you decide a criminal career's a good idea, and you don't need to be in prison for us to monitor you on that count. Besides, if we locked up everyone with superpowers suited to illegal activities on this planet, we'd be here all century."

Her eyes narrowed. "Not saying you're going to get off scot-free, mind – you've still got at least two murders on your hands plus a whole host of other, more minor crimes, and they aren't just going to go away no matter how much you feel remorse for them and no matter what your mental state at the time. We're just here to suggest an endpoint, a way for you to repay your debt to society – and believe me, you racked one up – in a way more constructive than just staying cooped up in here for the rest of your natural life. Oh, we didn't give you our names, did we? I'm Ser- no, _Corporal_ Teana Lanster, and the professional Modern Belkan melee specialist and semi-professional idiot over there is Corporal Subaru Nakajima."

"Hey!" Subaru protested.

"Charmed," Gina replied. "So, about this rehabilitation program, Lanster. Brainwashing, right? I'll warn you, I'm not sure how well lobotomies work on shapeshifters. If I were you, I'd explore the abilities of that Acous guy you mentioned. Just a suggestion, mind."

There was another awkward pause.

"... If I asked you what the hell kind of planet you come from, you'd just reply with another smartarse remark about your file, right?" Teana asked. "The standard procedure's for some voluntary work with the Bureau until you've served your sentence, plus therapy sessions to help you adjust to life outside evil-minion work, just in case you're unfamiliar with the concept. If you're lucky, you'll even get a few years taken off for good behaviour. We've obtained a lot of our best recruits that way, including both Colonel Yagami and Captain Testarossa-Harlaown. Sound like something you'd be interested in?"

The atmosphere in the small room had not been terribly warm to begin with. Now, though, it dropped to sub-zero temperatures.

"Ah, I see," the former assassin said quietly. "You want to use me as well. I know I mentioned my file before, but you seem to have forgotten what was in it. The gods turned me into a monster, Lanster. I spied for them. I killed for them. I committed crimes which you don't even have names for. I ate the bones of innocents whose only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time when I needed a disguise. I have so many memories of others and so few of my own that it's hard for me to know who I am anymore. I damned myself for them because it was my role, my function in bringing about the safety and stability they preached. They betrayed me, and I was so fucked in the head at first that _I thought I deserved it_. I don't give a shit why you want something like me, Lanster. I couldn't care less what mealy-mouthed justification you have for it. It's _not going to happen_, capisce?"

There was a strangled sob and Gina felt herself caught in a bone-crushing hug, blue hair tickling her nose and warm droplets staining her chest. She had never even seen Subaru move.

"What I think my esteemed colleague is trying to explain in her... ah... unique manner," Teana explained drily, "is that our primary purpose is not to get you on our side as a military asset. The community service program is mostly intended to give you something to do during the rehab process – Bureau-exclusive jobs include everything from administrative work through emergency services to park duty. Funnily enough, it's the first of those that requires the most character assessment and monitoring. Not all of it's government-exclusive either – there's a few businesses and charities that take in ex-cons on a rehab stint, most significantly the Belkan Saint Church and a couple of the other sane-ish denominations. All we ask is that you let us discuss the options available to you."

Subaru looked up at her with huge, puppy-like eyes, but Gina still had her pride, and she was damned if she was going to let this go without a fight. _After all, when was the last time I had the chance to be this childish?_

"So you... _hwee_... want me to spend... the rest of the day... getting preached at?" she wheezed, struggling to breathe past the astonishingly heavy mass of overenthusiastic combat mage currently squashing her. "Think I'd prefer the... _hwee_... brainwashing, to be honest. At least it wouldn't... be as time-consuming. What's in it for me?"

"Subaru, let go before you kill her." Teana rolled her eyes. "You mean apart from the obvious? Look, we want to help you, but if you're just going to be a contrarian little-"

"We'll buy you ice-cream!"

The red-haired mage stared at her colleague's happily smiling face. "_What_."

Gina just laughed. She laughed until her shoulders shook, until tears streamed down her face. There were certain things in the multiverse that were fundamentally impossible, and one of them, she now knew, was trying to out-childish Subaru Nakajima.

Teana shook her head. "Kids. Why do they _always_ send me to deal with kids?"

* * *

The trip to Mid-Childa had been disorientatingly fast – a short walk from the detention spire to the nearest transporter station (which still bore the scars from the Hellhounds' demo charges), a flash of light, and all of a sudden they were in an airy, spacious terminal building beneath a clear blue sky. Gina gazed over the edge of the open-air walkway they currently strolled along towards the low, bulky monorail building ahead, and scratched at the metal collar around her throat. It wasn't that it was particularly uncomfortable – in fact, it was designed not to be – but having a bomb attached to your neck warranted _some_ sort of acknowledgement, in her opinion.

The standard-issue TSAB restraint collar, despite its innocuous appearance, was a frighteningly complicated piece of equipment designed according to documents salvaged from the Infinite Library. It could be imbued with multiple enchantments at once – in Gina's case, seals that suppressed her magical and transformative abilities as well as a conditional attack spell set to explode with sufficient force to blow a hole in the side of a tank and alert every combat mage within a five-mile radius were she to attempt to take it off, venture too far from her escort, or violate any one of half a dozen other conditions. The only thing preventing the collar from qualifying as a war crime just by _existing_ was that it was not designed to kill or even particularly harm prisoners fitted with it, instead simply facilitating recapture were they to attempt to escape. Magical weapons were funny like that.

Despite its presence, though, she was surprised at how little thought she had given to making a run for it. Certainly, getting out from under the Bureau's scrutiny and scuttling off to a life of happy obscurity was not an unappealing prospect, and hardly impossible so long as she was in the open with just two guards on a crowded city-world.

There were certain disadvantages to such an idea, such as the fact that she would be squandering the goodwill she had thus far accumulated with an organisation that seemed to genuinely want to help her (apart from the explosive collar, anyway), and that she knew from hacking into their files prior to the daemon's visit that current Bureau military doctrine when facing Divine Assassins was to pull back all their forces from the area and send in a Humanoid Interface. None of those, though, were the primary reason for her continued cooperation. In fact, she didn't have the slightest idea what that reason was, though she was very interested indeed in figuring it out.

"You know, I'm a cyborg as well," Subaru said conversationally from beside her. It wasn't the most conventional of openers compared to, say, discussing the weather – at least, so far as Gina's many stolen memories informed her – but then, expecting convention from someone like the sunny-dispositioned corporal was an exercise in futility.

"Oh?" she asked weakly. "Well, I suppose the hair was a clue." _And the weight,_ her abused body reminded her.

The mage nodded happily. "Yup. I can't shapeshift like you can – how does that work, by the way? – but I've got enhanced speed, strength, and agility, not to mention durability. Oh – and I can do _this_."

She pointed her gauntleted hand at the horizon, firing off a ripple of pale blue energy blasts from its palm. When she turned back to them, her eyes were a hard metallic gold before she blinked and they reverted to their usual sea-green.

"No charging time, no incantation needed, and it's got an EMP effect that really does a number on machinery. I don't use it much, since I can't cast spells when I switch to firing mode and it does permanent damage to anything with a nervous system, but it's quite useful for demolition work. Neat, huh?" Her brow creased. "Erm – you _are_ a cyborg, right? I mean, I don't want to... you know, make assumptions."

Gina briefly considered not answering – even if Subaru didn't have the foresight to record a conversation on Divine Assassin capabilities, Teana certainly would – and then decided that she really didn't give a damn. "Sort of, I suppose. My transformation abilities have more of a biological basis, plus a healthy dose of Warp-sorcery, but I'm fitted with several bionic implants as well. The phase blade, for instance, as well as an infiltrator nanite package and multi-spectral recording device. So where are you going with this? 'Hey, we're both soulless part-mechanical abominations, let's be friends'?"

As usual, the corporal proved wholly immune to sarcasm. "Ooh! Can we? Please? I just wanted to say that if I could integrate properly, I'm sure you can. In fact, you might find it even easier!"

The former assassin leaned towards Teana, muttering under her breath. "No kidding. Dye my hair and subtract a few dozen brain cells, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

The look she received in reply was icy. "Are you insulting Subaru's intelligence?"

"Oh, come on, like you haven't done it about seven times since we left the cell. Shall I replay your exact words for you?"

This time, the blush was so intense that Gina rather imagined it could have glowed in the dark. "That's... that's different."

Before the gunslinger could explain precisely _why_ it was different, though, a grey-haired man in a TSAB uniform walked past in the opposite direction, giving her a friendly nod. "Morning, Sergeant – long time no see. How's it going?"

Gina felt a stab of irritation – and guilt, curiously – from Teana, but the mage managed a polite smile nonetheless. "It's 'corporal' these days, Herschel. The Cerberus Incident saw to that."

He raised his eyebrows. "Ah? Makes sense, I suppose. After the eels started pouring out of that truck, I knew _someone_ was going to pay for it. Pity it had to be you, though, Lanster. Well, I'd best get going – duty calls. We should definitely get in touch some time – always good to see a familiar face from the Investigative Branch."

It was not until the other mage was well out of earshot that Teana's mask dropped and she let loose a short, ugly curse. "Why is it that everyone keeps bringing that damned thing up? Can't I at least be allowed to _try_ to forget it?"

Subaru placed a hand on her colleague's shoulder, her face the very image of concern. "It's all right, Tea. You know, you shouldn't be so upset about it, it wasn't _that_ bad-"

"_Not that bad_?" Teana rounded on her with such force that the cyborg almost backed all the way into the wall. "Eight mages were hospitalised due to mental trauma, the Chief Administrator's pet manticore got eaten, property damage was in the high millions, and the main highway to the capital was blocked by a wall of caviar for _two fucking weeks_! How is that 'not that bad', huh, Subaru? I'm really curious!"

Subaru's eyes were wide as saucers. "Tea..."

Gina cleared her throat. "Ahem – freaky biomantic killing machine of questionable allegiance over here. Just in case you'd forgotten."

Both girls snapped to attention, Teana caught mid-inhalation prior to unleashing another rant. She berated her colleague for failing to pay attention to their prisoner, naturally, but her heart didn't quite seem to be in it, and Gina heard the _sotto voce_ apology she mumbled as they set off again towards the monorail. Subaru completely missed it, of course, but then that was to be expected.

The shapeshifter felt a smile appear on her face. There were some kinds of entertainment you just couldn't buy.

* * *

"So," Gina declared. "You and Lanster."

The expedition's two metahumans sat on a low, flat-topped park wall, watching the traffic go by as the third member of their party perused the maps available in a nearby tourist information centre. The monorail had stopped two stations short of their intended destination, its driver citing 'technical difficulties'. Said 'difficulties' had turned out to be a mile-wide, perfectly hemispherical crater where a citykiller mage had apparently decided to live up to the nickname in a last, desperate suicide attack during the invasion. Though Subaru had assured them that what they had come for was still present, getting to it might prove problematic.

Even here, an area largely untouched by the raids, the city still bore scars, and not just the occasional burn patch on the buildings or the very obvious gap in the built-up skyline where the crater lay. The aforementioned traffic, vehicular and pedestrian alike, was uncommonly light, and those who walked (or in some cases flew) past them were far too quiet. It was as if something had taken away just a little of the life from the neighbourhood, to the point where the main reason the assassin was trying to start a conversation was to distract herself from the weird, oppressive atmosphere.

The corporal blinked at her. "Mmm?"

"What is it that you see in her?"

She _saw_ Subaru's eyes light up. "Oh, she's smart, she's brave, she's _really_ pretty..."

"... And she's got the personality of an alligator turtle minus the charm," Gina finished for her. "I mean, seriously, Nakajima, why do you put _up_ with her crap? She save your life or something?"

"Yup. Six times."

"Excuse me?"

"She saved my life six times. Well, seven, if you count that business with the ramen bar. I know Tea's not the easiest person to get along with sometimes, but she's always kept an eye out for me even when she didn't have to. Besides, it's not really my place to say, but she hasn't exactly had the easiest life, you know?"

"Well, that's bullshit right there. You know what I've been through – I've mentioned it often enough – and am I a short-tempered, abrasive jerk? Am I?" There was an awkward pause. "Wait – don't answer that."

"Look, she's really not so bad once you get to know her – and, well, your side _did_ just kick off a war with us that left entire planets in ruins and got billions killed, so you're not exactly going to see her at her best. Me, I just think you're rubbing each other the wrong way."

It was at that point that Gina finally noticed the elephant in the proverbial living-room. "So... about that. You seem to be taking it pretty well – the war, that is."

The ever-present smile faltered a little, and the assassin felt something dark pass beneath the sun-kissed waters of Subaru Nakajima's mind. "Well, someone has to, don't they?"

"I... don't follow."

"A quarter of my unit is dead," the blue-haired girl said in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone that made Gina's skin crawl. "Most of them were fresh recruits, plus our youngest two members, who were both good friends of mine and the adoptive children of two of our most senior officers. Morale is almost non-existent, and that's _before_ you take into account the decimation of our government, the slaughter of civilians, many of them our friends or family, and the reduction of the Bureau's capital-world itself to rubble. Someone has to keep their spirits up, and... well, I know I'm not the brightest person in the First, but at least I can do cheerful."

The smile had returned, but her eyes were unnaturally bright. "Being sad about it won't bring anyone back, right? Might as well focus on what we can do to stop it happening again and help those who are still alive. Besides, what would be the point of taking it out on you? You know what you did was wrong, you said you won't do it again, and your gods don't seem to want you back anyway."

"And that's enough for you?"

"Well, yes. Three years ago, during the Scaglietti Incident, my sister, Ginga, got kidnapped, and in the fight that came after, I hospitalised one of the snatch team who did it. It's how I found out what my IS blasts do to cyborgs... it wasn't very nice." She winced at the memory. "After the Incident, though, about two thirds of the agents we captured got put on the rehabilitation program – the others weren't interested – and my dad adopted four of them, including the three who'd attacked Gin. It was her idea, you see. The guy in charge of them was the same one who'd created us in the first place, and when she was caught, she was brainwashed into being a loyal servant just like them until I managed to stop her. She knew what they'd been through, and she forgave them for it. These days, they're a rapid-response team working for the Capital Defence Forces, and she's in command. They saved a lot of lives during the attack."

Gina processed this. "So I..."

"Everyone has a chance to be a good person. Nobody's beyond redemption – it's just a question of whether they want it and what we can do to help. That's why it's so sad when someone doesn't take that chance – whether because they like hurting people, because they feel that they don't have an escape, or just because they feel they don't deserve it. That's what I think, anyway."

There was a blur of motion, followed by the terrible, crushing pressure around the assassin's pseudo-ribcage and slowly spreading damp patch on her shoulder that indicated another patented Nakajima hug. Despite herself, she was rather reassured. Having Subaru act serious and mature for more than a minute or so was profoundly disconcerting, like a goldfish quoting Proust, and all the more so since it had pretty much come out of nowhere. Clearly, her empathic abilities didn't work quite so well on part-mechanical brains.

Besides, some of the girl's comments had hit just a little too close to home.

"So that's it," Subaru's muffled voice said. "I don't care whether you become a combat mage, an asteroid miner, a nun, or whatever. Just promise me you'll try to have a good life, won't you? Please?"

"Gkht," Gina agreed. She was no wide-eyed idealist, and had no idea whether she was in fact willing or able to do that, but there were some people you simply couldn't say no to. Even when they were rapidly turning your internals into puree.

Subaru disengaged herself, beaming happily again, though her eyes were still a little bit red. "Good! Oh, hey, Tea's back. Hi, Tea!"

The other mage looked remarkably composed – Gina barely even saw the flash of orange light as she deactivated her Device.

"Hey there, Subaru," she said distractedly. "Mind if I talk with the prisoner a moment? I'll be right back."

At Teana's gesture, they wandered out of earshot. Gina was the first to speak.

"Those cybernetics of hers – they really _didn't_ include a sensory upgrade package, did they? So how long were you watching?"

"Long enough. I took a few cues from Earthborn special-ops while I was working with the CDF – Cross Mirage is equipped with a long-range microphone, like a laser-mike that doesn't require a sheet of glass to listen in, if that makes sense. Very useful for surveillance work – you know, like when a self-confessed 'freaky biomantic killing machine' is alone with your squad-mate and you want to be sure she's not about to get a knife in the guts. Just as an illustrative example."

_So I wasn't just being paranoid._ The assassin grinned. "Oh? Must have had quite the case of burning ears, then. Like what you heard?"

Teana gave no indication of listening beyond a slight pinkening of her cheeks. "You realise, of course, that under _any_ other circumstances making her cry would have resulted in me turning your life into a living hell?"

"Sure, sure. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt..."

"... And can't resist bringing it up at the slightest opportunity. So you had a traumatic past. _We get it already_."

"Corporal Lanster, Miss Sensitivity. Do you give seminars? I'd love to attend. So how are we getting where we're going, then?"

Teana held up a hand. "Ah... one question first – sorry if it's embarrassing. The hug. Did she... um... grab anywhere inappropriate?"

Gina's eyebrows practically vanished into her hairline. "Warp's teeth. Is that a legitimate concern?"

"With Subaru? Almost a certainty. Don't think she quite gets the whole concept of personal space, to be honest. Had to check – we've actually had a few complaints about it, in Colonel 'Grabass' Yagami's unit of all places, and guess who's had to deal with them? – but I'll take that as a 'no'. Suppose there are some advantages to being under-endowed after all."

"_Oi_!"

The redhead just smiled serenely. "Anyway, yeah, I've got a route planned out. First we'll go down New Adler Street, then take a left at..."

The assassin took a cursory look at the map before filtering her out, busy thinking up a cavalcade of witty, cutting comebacks that would have been oh-so-useful about a minute ago.

_This ice-cream had better be damned good, that's all I'm __saying..._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** That's right, ladies and gentlemen, it's that time of the week once more. Two more chapters for the pile.

Yes, Gina's name was indeed taken from a certain other blonde, not-quite human infiltrator. It's pretty much inconceivable to me that Mid-Childa's Earthborn population _wouldn't _include a sci-fi fan or two, given the nature of the place, and the chronology (according to my calculations, the Nanohaverse's sections take place in about 2019, based on their Earth's calendars) ensures that the _Battlestar Galactica _remake fans would have had plenty of time to go forth and multiply. Whether this required mass-production and/or a kilometres-long resurrection ship is something I leave entirely to your imagination.


	31. Out on the Town

**30. Out on the Town**

The crater was not the worst part. In fact, it wasn't that bad at all, construction barriers across the streets around largely blocking their view of the wreckage beyond. The worst part was a quarter of an hour later, when their route took them through one of the affected neighbourhoods that were _not_ walled off.

It had not exactly been an up-market place to start with; more a temporary shanty town with aspirations. Now, though, it was something far less pleasant. Buildings had been ripped apart, their contents exposed to the skies and their structural integrity often maintained only by the faint, ambient glow and bars of multicoloured light that indicated magical reinforcement. The tidy little prefabricated shelters erected in every available space had been smashed into pieces, their contents scattered across the road. The streets themselves had fared no better, their smooth surfaces ripped apart by uncountable explosions. Pools of sewage were dotted here and there, the legacy of ruptured pipes beneath the ground, but even their collective stench could not wholly mask the richer, more troubling smell of decaying human interwoven with it. Dark stains marked the walls and pavement here and there, their shape and colour making their nature brutally obvious.

Gina stared around, horrified. She had seen the footage from the Bureau combat logs, and gained a few inklings from helping with the attack on the central office, but that in no way compared to the real thing staring you in the face.

"Where _are_ we?"

"The outskirts of the Suzumiyaverse enclave," Teana said, her face pale. "It was a staging area until we could get them some proper housing – integrating fifteen thousand people into a city in a month or so isn't as easy as it sounds, especially when they weren't the only ones on the way. I knew they got hit in the attack, but I thought they drove them off. I thought this would be another safe zone! I didn't expect something like... like _this_!"

The assassin just nodded. Everywhere, she saw the marks of daemons – a wall partially dissolved by a Reigling's acid, the massive, charred paw-prints of a Blood Hound, a door caved in by a Valkyrie's axe – on buildings that could only have been used to hold civilians. Nowhere was there any regard for the gods' prohibitions – _their supposed prohibitions, anyway_ – just a silent hymn to the joy of slaughter.

"And what's with the people?" Subaru asked. "They're like... like..."

'_Zombies', I think, is the word you're looking for._ There _were_ people here, but it was easy not to notice them. Gina had thought the ones they had encountered before lifeless, but compared to those they now saw, the people in the safe districts had practically been hopped up on amphetamines. These men and women moved listlessly, purposelessly, as if in a dream, apathetic to what lay around them. It was not uniform – some, standing out like splashes of colour in the grey cityscape, were almost normal – and the manner of its expression varied from person to person, but it was a trait shared to some extent by most of the population. Gina had once eaten a psychologist (one of the few kills she didn't regret to some extent these days – some people had _really_ unpleasant ideas about how to supplement their income), and she was pretty sure that acute shellshock, by definition, wasn't supposed to last this long for so many people at once. The area's wounds might have dated back to the invasion, but its populace's seemed considerably fresher.

"What happened to them?" she asked, putting her puzzlement into words. "This can't just be the result of the attack."

Teana shook her head. "I don't know. I heard their universe got liberated lately – frankly, I'd have expected street parties. Maybe there was a catch? Whatever the case, let's get out of here. This place is creeping me out."

"No argument here," Gina agreed.

They set off, trying to ignore the devastation around them. Though the streets were difficult to navigate in their ruined state, they were met with no real interruptions by either geography or inhabitants until they were almost at the far edge of the enclave, when Subaru started to head towards the entrance of a many-storeyed apartment block that was little more than a fire-gutted shell. The assassin stepped out in front of her, extending her arm to block her path.

"Trust me – you _really_ don't want to go in there."

"But... I heard someone. They were crying, they sounded so alone... I thought maybe I could help. I've done work with Disaster Planning and Rescue – that's what we do. Help people."

Though the cyborg's emotions were, as always, hidden from Gina's mindsight by her implants, she would have had to be blind and deaf as well to miss the note of desperation in her eyes and voice. Travelling through somewhere like the Suzumiyaverse enclave and being able to do nothing for the people there could not have been easy for someone like Subaru.

"You didn't hear anyone. See those claw marks in the pavement? The really fine ones the concrete's all shiny around? A Siren of Mislaato was here. Possibly several. Best-case scenario, you'd find a pile of her handiwork in there, and that's not much of a 'best' by any means."

"Siren?" Teana asked. "Let me guess – they use illusions to lure in prey."

"Sometimes. Most of the ones I worked alongside seemed to favour the more direct approach – drag their victims off and play with them for a few hours. Or days. Doubt that's why they got the name, though. The gods have this habit of calling their creations whatever they think sounds cool. Exhibit A – the Black Pharaohs."

She looked up at the building, feeling the charred, empty holes where the windows had been seemingly _stare_ at her.

"Lanster, you're the one with links to the CDF, right? Get in contact with them, and see if you can get this place demolished. There's some taints that don't just go away with some scrubbing and detergent."

The gunslinger raised an eyebrow. "You said you worked with these... creatures, whatever they are, and now you want us to flatten a place they've visited? Quite the turn-around."

"It's _because_ I worked with them. It was bad enough when they sent them in against a smuggling operation during my enforcement days, and that's coming from someone who _ate_ people on a regular basis back then. Valkyries? Sure, I get it. Asukhon's the goddess of warfare. Pharaohs? Fine. Tzintchi's the leader of the gods. Of course he's going to want a stake in the operations. Sirens, though? In a fucking _civilian district_? There's no excuse. Just what the hell's _happened_ to us?"

She slammed her fist into the wall, white-hot pain lancing up her arm as the pseudo-bones shattered and slowly began to heal. It shouldn't have been nearly as satisfying as it was. The two mages glanced at each other, but said nothing.

"Like you said, Lanster, let's go. You can't help anyone here."

* * *

Thirty-five minutes later, they were sat eating ice-cream on a small park bench in a leafy quadrangle in the middle of a pleasantly sleepy safe zone... and Gina was experiencing _exactly_ the level of bewildered disconnect that sentence implied. She knew from the downloads on military history she had received that the distance between bombed-out warzone and peaceful safety was often remarkably short, and she knew that it was often considerably faster to travel from staggering wealth to crippling poverty in any given city (sometimes, in fact, you just had to turn the corner), but such a vivid demonstration was still unnerving. To be honest, she'd been unnerved by a lot of things lately; yet another piece of evidence that mind-wiping, gratuitous mental and physical torture, and isolation from the rest of human civilisation except when called upon to reduce it by a member or two were not the ideal methods for creating a perfect, adaptable infiltrator.

_When the most intimate, personal interaction you have on a regular basis with other people is absorbing their memories, slitting their throats, and devouring their corpses, you know you've got a problem._

Trying to take her mind off things, she examined her ice-cream once more. It really was very good – the owners apparently knew her two guards well, and had greeted them cheerily as soon as they had walked in. Their demeanour had not changed when they discovered that the third member of the party was a prospective rehabber – in fact, the tubby, jovial man managing the counter had immediately decided to make it his mission to demonstrate the wonders of Mid-Childan culture to her via the medium of frozen dessert, and it had only been by the exercise of all her cunning and willpower that she had managed to talk him down to a conservative two scoops of chocolate. That had not prevented the sprinkles or wafer from creeping in uninvited, though.

The combat mages had fared no better, though they had offered considerably less protest. Teana had ended up with an overstuffed Neapolitan combo, whilst Subaru... well, Subaru apparently held the entire edible contents of the shop in a single, gigantic cone, which she was currently going through with the gusto of an industrial vacuum. That had not, however, stopped her from pausing to pop a scoop into her comrade's mouth, which Teana took with the sort of automatic precision that spoke of long-held custom. Their nominal prisoner, for her part, just wished she had a camera.

Her hand still stung a bit, but it had mostly regained its original shape. Subaru had asked if she could have a look at it, but Gina had politely declined (insofar as she _did_ politeness, anyway). She knew from past experience that the regenerative properties of a Callidus were more than enough to deal with it – she wouldn't have broken the damned thing otherwise – and besides, the notion of a super-strong war machine probing her injury, no matter how well-intentioned, was enough to cause her to break out in a cold sweat.

"Hey, Tea, mind calling up the net?" the cyborg asked around a mouthful of pineapple sorbet. "I heard Nanoha's giving an interview today."

"Sure thing, Subaru." The redhead seemed more relaxed than Gina had ever seen her – it couldn't last, of course. "Aww, it's with Platina? Do we _have_ to watch this rubbish?"

"_Pleeeease_?"

Subaru's face was the very image of piteous entreaty. Her colleague twitched and went bright red, whilst the assassin had to lean back to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

"Fine, fine, if you say so. Someday, though, we are going to have to have a _talk_ about that tactic."

Teana summoned her Device, the huge pistol she called Cross Mirage, and muttered a quick incantation. A holographic screen appeared in midair before them, showing what appeared to be a television studio, or at least the Mid-Childan equivalent thereof. A manufacturedly attractive, middle-aged woman was sat in a large, comfortable chair at its centre, the text at the bottom of the display identifying her as one Thalia Platina.

"Hello, and welcome back to _Eye on Clanagan_, the chat show that gets to the heart of politics both in our capital and beyond. Our next guest for today is something of a diversion from the norm – the youngest combat instructor in the TSAB Air Force, a soldier known across Mid-Childa for both her heroics in battle and her controversial personal life, including associations with former criminals such as..."

Teana made a disgusted sound. "Controversial? Where? New Goatfuck on Varduk Prime? Kaiser's blood, it's like that bastard General Gaiz is still running the show. Always playing to the cheap seats, huh, Platina?"

"So what's her stance, then?" Gina asked, indicating the screen.

"Whatever the current government's isn't. Easy way to get viewing figures, that. At the moment, that means iron-hard social conservatism – she wouldn't like you much, that's for sure. Not that I do either, but that's beside the point. That nasty little passive-aggressive anti-military bent of hers is all Platina, though. Closest thing to an actual opinion of her own she's got. She was the first one to jump on the 'support our troops' bandwagon, and you know what _that_ means."

"...Exactly the opposite of what it does in the rest of the known multiverse?"

"Hah, yes. Think your Orwell had a monopoly on doublethink? You're about to get a masterclass."

"Why's Takamachi taking an interview from her, then?" Gina asked, confused.

"Because the good captain, for all her myriad merits, has the political acumen of a dead chicken. Stop looking at me like that, Subaru, you know it's true. She probably thought it would be a smart way for the armed forces to reach out to the general public – for her next trick, I presume, she'll climb on top of the ruins of GovCentral and publicly denounce the Chief Administrator's memory in order to get government support."

Subaru's brow furrowed. "But... why would Nanoha want to do that? She voted for him, didn't she?"

"_Sarcasm_, Subaru. Learn it. Just sit back and watch the show, will you?"

By this point, Platina was winding down to the end of her lengthy introduction, which had essentially amounted to a summary of her guest's life history entirely via stealth insults and backhanded compliments. Gina was rather impressed.

"...And so without further ado, allow me to introduce... Captain Nanoha Takamachi!"

Nanoha walked in to polite applause, wearing a conservative navy-blue suit. She and her host exchanged pleasantries for a moment, and then sat down.

"Oh, no uniform?" Teana asked wearily. "So she went for the 'out-of-touch armchair general' look rather than 'fascist oppressor'. Good choice. Belka's fall, but I can't watch this."

The next few minutes passed uneventfully as the two women in the studio discussed the extent of the raids, what countermeasures the Bureau was currently taking, and the general state of the multiverse. Nanoha remained calm, friendly, and professional throughout, the very image of a seasoned veteran. With Teana now sticking her fingers in her ears and closing her eyes, Subaru and Gina were left to watch the interview unfold. The former remained oblivious to her friend's dire prognostications, instead just drinking in the captain's words with an expression of rapt heroine-worship, whilst the latter was busy waiting for the other shoe to drop... and drop it did.

"Now, captain," Platina said, smiling sweetly, "it cannot have escaped the military's notice that a significant number of its casualties during the attack were under sixteen years of age. Some people have been wondering whether we ought to reconsider recruiting child soldiers for the armed forces, and I was wondering how you might address their concerns?"

"Child soldiers?" Nanoha asked. "That's a rather loaded term, isn't it, Thalia? The Bureau hasn't fought a war in decades – combat mages are used for police duty more than anything else. The most action they will see in normal circumstances is a small-scale, low-lethality skirmish on occasion. Magical combat presents a relatively low risk of permanent damage to its participants, after all. Even then, our officers ensure that the younger recruits are kept away from front-line combat as much as possible, and supervised by more experienced mages or summoned beasts at all times. Really, recruitment at that age is more about training powerful young mages in how to safely handle abilities that might otherwise present a serious danger to themselves and others than turning them into weapons for the Bureau."

Platina nodded as if receiving wisdom from a passing deity. "I see. Could it not be said, though, that as a former underage recruit yourself, you are somewhat biased on this matter?"

"Well, yes, it could, but then what would be the point of 'them' asking me?" Nanoha replied, placing a certain ironic emphasis on the pronoun. "I prefer to think of myself as having the necessary experience to answer the question. Every time I went into battle as a child, it was either on my own initiative due to a complete absence of other agents in the area – hardly an unlikelihood, given that our organisation's jurisdiction covers a good portion of the multiverse – or because the people in command knew that I had the physical and emotional fortitude to deal with the level of combat I was going to be sent to. That second option is what we have been trying to encourage as the only criterion for deploying underage recruits – you'll notice that most of the higher-profile ones were either at a minimum double-A-rank to start off with like myself and Colonel Yagami, or tactical and strategic prodigies like Admiral Harlaown. Magical power can compensate a great deal for a lack of combat experience – the artillery tends not to get shot at so much."

"And yet a lot of children in uniform died when these 'Chaos' creatures attacked us," Platina pointed out. "What went wrong?"

"Put simply, we were ambushed by a completely unknown enemy armed with the weapons, intelligence, and numbers to reliably take down combat mages. That doesn't happen very often, and we were completely caught off-guard. It would be foolish to blame Command for this – the closest thing they had to draw experience from in recent years was the Scaglietti Incident, and when it comes down to it, that was really just a dozen or so cyborgs and some mass-produced drones versus an entire planet. What we encountered when Chaos launched its assault was what Intelligence operatives call an 'out-of-context event', something we had absolutely no way of preparing for, and so our usual measures for ensuring the safety of our recruits couldn't be put in place in time. There's something about heavily-armed commandos teleporting into your living quarters that does that, you know." Even through the screen, Gina saw the tightness around Nanoha's eyes. _This... is not going to end well._

"So you believe that the deaths in battle of over fifty thousand underage recruits on Mid-Childa alone, including two of your own children, were unavoidable?" The reporter's smile could have dissolved molars at fifty paces.

Nanoha went very, very still. When she spoke, it was little more than a whisper.

"_My children did not die in battle_. They were attacked in their own room, they were captured, and they were _murdered_. I don't know what your agenda is here, Thalia, but I advise that you find some other mascots for it."

Gina had seen enough. She tapped Teana on the shoulder, causing the redhead to open her eyes and unplug her ears.

"Hey. Lanster. Turn it off."

"Isn't that supposed to be _my_ line?"

"I'm serious. Turn it off."

"Fine, fine..." Another incantation, and the screen vanished. "So what was the problem? Did Platina get it to look like the captain admitted to being the illicit lovechild of Jail Scaglietti and the Agriculture Minister or something? Because seriously, she does that to _everyone_."

"She brought up Erio and Caro," Subaru replied simply.

Teana's eyes widened. "Oh, shit."

"Pretty much, yeah," Gina agreed. "Look, I know emotional trauma. Back when I was with the Keeper of Secrets, it had this nasty habit of showing me my own face after a particularly intense run-around. Now, I'm not saying she looked _that_ bad, but I don't know what was stopping her from opening fire on that studio, either – and believe me, I'm not kidding."

"Nanoha wouldn't do that," Subaru stated, her voice laced with a certainty that would brook no argument.

"Maybe that's the case, but I doubt she's the only one who lost people she cared about – hell, you said as much yourself. How many others are in the same state? How many of them have the same level of willpower? I mean, it's not as if you lot are that used to this sort of thing, far as I can tell – at least, not on this scale. Not to tell you your jobs, but you could have a serious problem on your hands here."

"We're not as fragile as you think we are, assassin," Teana answered coolly. "We can deal with that."

"I hope you're right – mid-combat breakdowns aren't pretty. Take it from someone who knows." _And if you aren't, don't say I didn't warn you._

The small party was rather quiet for a while after that.

* * *

Since nobody was terribly interested in walking back to the monorail – once through the Suzumiyaverse enclave had been more than enough – the uniform consensus was that a taxi should be found. Unfortunately, having half the city flattened did little for the available transport options, and so it was that Subaru headed off to chat with a family friend in the area who ran a small company of her own, leaving Gina and Teana to stand around and be awkward at each other. After a few abortive attempts at small-talk, the former decided to take a leaf from the cyborg's book and go for the direct approach.

"You know, all things considered, my hand healed a lot faster than it should have back there. When did you turn the collar off?"

Teana, as usual, looked entirely unimpressed at this fantastic leap of deductive reasoning. "Bit after we left the enclave. Figured if you were going to turn on us, you would have done so by now. You've had, what? Six opportunities? Seven?"

"Fifteen. You spend _way_ too much time covering Nakajima. So, this trip. Trust exercise, right? Wanted to see if I was ready for the rehab program?"

"Pretty much. I'll admit it wasn't exactly planned in advance, but when Subaru's around, you sort of learn to operate on the fly. So, interested?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I know I need some help adjusting to normality, and I'm pretty short on other options, but I don't want to be a tool either. Atoning's fine. My lot've dumped a whole bucketload of crap on the multiverse at large, and it only seems fair that I redress the balance a little. I'd like it to be on my own terms, though, thank you very much – just doing the same thing all over again for a different side does _not_ appeal."

"That, I think we can agree on. Doubt the military's quite up for employing cannibalistic shapeshifters as a tactical asset either."

"Pfft. You Bureau-types – so squeamish. Mind if I take out my eyeball now?"

"... Excuse me?"

"My left eyeball. It's a bionic implant – that recording device I mentioned earlier. Has some stuff on it that you lot might find useful. So – may I?"

"Umm... sure, go ahead."

"Sure you don't want to look away? I mean, it's going to be kind of icky."

"Thanks, but no thanks. Command would have my ovaries in a sack if I let you transform unsupervised."

"Fine – your call. Here goes..."

There was a deeply unpleasant, organic sound.

"... Kaiser's nodes on a platter, don't you have _bones_?"

"Nope – they're made of the same stuff as the rest of my body, just hardened into a support structure for whatever shape I'm in at the moment. How'd you think I fixed the hand?"

"Can't say I'd given it much thought. What's on the recorder, then?"

"Everything I know about the gods' military capabilities, just in case your Inspector Acous missed something, plus a little propaganda vid I cooked up which might come in handy. Here you go."

Teana looked down dubiously at the small, spherical, and slightly slimy object the assassin had deposited in her hand. "So how do we use it?"

"Well, duh. Shove it in your eye-socket and download the data. Thought that'd be obvious." Gina saw the mage's appalled expression and grinned broadly. "I kid, I kid. It's got a USB port behind a hatch in the back. Check with your Earthborn friends if you're not sure what that is. Apart from the warp-sorcery and the blueprints from the far future, we're actually pretty low-tech, you know."

"Anyone ever tell you your sense of humour needs work? Anyway, thanks for the data. We'll see what we can do with it. Anything else?"

"One other thing, yes. You two shoved a metric tonne of unsolicited advice in my face today, and I figured I might as well return the favour."

"Go on."

"Nakajima. You care about her a lot, don't you?"

As expected, Teana went bright red again. "Well, of course I do. She's a friend."

"Right. Sure. That's not what I meant, and you know it."

"Then I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about."

"Shall I stop you there, or do you want to keep lying to the empath? I mean, seriously now."

The mage's shoulders slumped. "Look, it's complicated, all right? _Really_ complicated."

"Complicated how? I mean, you're attracted to her, she's _definitely_ attracted to you, and this shiny, permissive society you seem to have here doesn't seem too likely to object. Forgive this simple ingénue of an assassin if she misunderstands, but if you aren't screwing that girl's cybernetically-augmented brains out on a regular basis, then one of you is doing something very, _very_ wrong."

"'Shiny and permissive'? Yeah, I bet you'd think that. OK, let me give you some background on this place. It's been four years since they bulldozed through full marriage rights for same-sex couples, and the screaming from the family-values crowd _still_ hasn't abated yet. Eight years since Field Marshal Sandero got booted out of the service when one of his aides found him in bed with a wing commander from the Air Force. Nanoha Takamachi. Fate Testarossa-Harlaown. Poster-girls of the military. Any idea how long they had to keep their relationship under wraps? Me neither. There's a reason such a statistically-improbable number of us work for the government anyway, though. Even with stuff like that 'don't ask, don't tell' policy some of the departments used to have before they finally figured out it wasn't serving its intended purpose, it was still the friendliest employer we could find." She sighed. "Still, at least we didn't have it as bad as the offworld artificials. Not that long ago that familiars were legally considered property, for a start. I know the old government gets a lot of flak these days, but it's amazing the changes it made. Lucky the new crowd were smart enough to keep up the good work."

"So what was your story?"

"Me? I'm from Wilhelmsburg. Little place a few hundred klicks from here with a real big Belkan influence. Famous for its moonleaf sauerkraut – tastier than it sounds. Anyway, it's an old military town, and not the good kind. Parents died when I was a kid, so my brother was the one who mostly brought me up. Hotshot combat mage with the CDF – even got a few decorations. Then he managed to get himself and his whole team killed when a routine mission went sour, and suddenly no-one wanted to know me. My specialty's illusions and ranged attacks – know why I picked it? Because when some hulking melee specialist's decided the orphan from a family of screw-ups would make a nice target to work out their issues on, you _don't_ want to be in arm's reach." She made a face. "Now imagine what it would have been like if I'd admitted to liking girls. Wouldn't have lasted three minutes."

"And the Bureau was a way out?"

"Bingo. I was a real model recruit, too – couldn't afford to show any weakness. Oh yes, I'd learned _that_ lesson all right. Things got better, though, especially after me and Subaru joined Section Six. Some ways, that place was more like a family than a military unit. Started getting some real confidence going, started not to give so much of a damn about what the folks back home might think of me... hell, by the time I'd made sergeant in the CDF, I was even starting to rehearse these silly little hypothetical invitations to a certain blue-haired idiot. You know, for a proper _date_, not just a get-together like we usually have. Yeah, daft idea, I know. All I'd have had to do was ask – Subaru isn't big on the subtleties, in case you hadn't figured that out already. It was progress, though, and that's what mattered to me."

"So what happened?"

"The Cerberus Incident. The _fucking_ Cerberus Incident. The shit was raining down for _weeks_ afterwards, and I didn't have a defence or even an excuse. I was at fault, and that was all there was to it. Before, I could just tell myself that it didn't really matter what I was or who I... cared about because hey, I was a Bureau enforcer, and a damned good one. Why should anything else matter? Afterwards, though? Not so much. Still had the job, at least, minus a bar on the epaulettes, but I was back to square one confidence-wise. Look, I know it's stupid, and I know it's irrational, but that doesn't make it easier to get over." She smiled. "I'm still trying, though."

"Smart move. Nakajima's a good kid – you'd have difficulty doing better, I think."

"Think I don't _know_ that? Besides, what's with the 'good kid' stuff? You're the same age we are!"

"Not the years, honey. It's the mileage. Gods, there's a cliché I've always wanted to use." She stretched an arm to wipe Teana's eyes, drawing a flinch from the mage. "Hey, no getting weepy. I swear, next person to pull a teary hug on me is going to have a phase blade administered to their pancreas."

Another irritated blush. "I wasn't – oh, forget it. That it?"

"Sorry – said I was done, but I suppose there's something else after all. Message for the 'blue-haired idiot', as you so eloquently referred to her. Mind telling her the unit's not going to fall apart just because she stops smiling? Like you said, you lot are tougher than you look."

The anger was back, and as with Subaru's overenthusiastic immaturity, Gina was inexplicably pleased to see it. "Wait, she's doing that _again_? After all I said to her about it last time? That's – I – _ugh_!"

It was, of course, at that point that the cyborg returned, only for the wrath of Teana to strike her like a verbal Claymore mine. For the second time that day, the assassin just wished she could sit back and take pictures.

* * *

The taxi was a sleek, bullet-like affair that gleamed in the afternoon sun, but it was still recognisably car-shaped, to Gina's surprise. Even with the extra memories, she'd really expected anti-gravity units to be in more widespread use on somewhere like Mid-Childa. It served its purpose, though, the driver skilfully navigating them through the city-world's endless geometric web of streets. They had to stop off halfway to the terminal in order to grab a meal – regenerating body parts always made Gina hungry, even one as small as an eye, whilst Subaru's formidable metabolism needed no excuse.

Whilst they were eating, the assassin decided to ask about the other members of the First Expeditionary Force – specifically, the ones she herself had killed. It was an awkward way to apologise, and the resultant conversation was unsurprisingly strained, but it still wasn't as bad as she had feared. In fact, she even managed to get some good information out of it, which she intended to add to her evening prayers – even if she wasn't that sure any more who she was supposed to be praying _to_.

Eventually, they returned to the cell, resulting in grudgingly amicable farewells between Gina and Teana and yet another organ-mashing embrace from Subaru that entirely failed to result in phase-blade-related unpleasantness. Once they had left, the assassin lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling and recalling the gunslinger's words.

_So this place isn't that perfect after all. Good. I don't think I could live in a utopia._

She picked up the leaflet they had handed her, and started to examine the appointment times.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yeah, this chapter got a bit political, but not just because I wanted an excuse to jump on the soapbox. Honest.

Given the composition of the TSAB military and its relative concern for humanitarian issues, I can quite easily see it seriously reconsidering the age of entry for its recruits if it were faced with a major military setback, and the Chaos assault certainly fulfils that criterion. For the record, no, I don't approve of child soldiers, especially as they tend to end up in real life, though the underage mages of the Bureau are a very big grey area indeed. It's for that reason that the debate was purposely left without a proper conclusion... though the fact that one of those involved was a stunningly tactless sensationalist and the other a recently-traumatised veteran might have had something to do with that as well.

As for Teana's back-story? Well, it all sort of fitted into place on its own with surprising ease, given what we already know about her childhood. The Belkan influence came from her unusually weapon-like Device and vaguely Germanic name, and managed to fill in the rest of the blanks quite nicely. Nothing like an ancient, conservative, and heavily-militarised society for a bit of good old-fashioned prejudice, after all.

See you next week!


	32. Test Protocols

**31. Test Protocols**

It was the midpoint of the year 20 ABY, and Luke Skywalker had a front-row seat at the second-largest publicity stunt in galactic history after the destruction of Alderaan... and he was about as enthused about it as he would have been if he were attending _that_ august event.

Given their string of defeats against the Yuuzhan Vong and the plummeting morale that was the natural result, it was obvious that the Republic needed a genuinely spectacular and decisive victory if it was going to have any hope of stemming the tide, and given that the first rule of warfare was 'don't fight fair if you can help it', it was equally obvious that this would require some sort of lure to get a sufficiently impressive portion of the Vong fleet in range for a just and righteous pounding.

The bad news, of course, was that such a trap would undoubtedly be seen through by the invaders' command echelons – subtlety was difficult to achieve in fast-paced, galactic-scale warfare – and so the bait in question would have to be something so inviting that they simply couldn't afford _not_ to go for it, ambush or no ambush. There was only one system in the vicinity of the main front that matched that criterion... and that was because the Republic couldn't afford to lose Coruscant, either. Being an impossible-to-evacuate galactic capital tended to encourage that mindset in one's owners and residents.

Luke was quite aware that to achieve victory one had to take the odd risk or two, but this was just ridiculous.

Nevertheless, he had only voiced minor dissent at the plan. Part of this was because he knew President Fey'lya's likely response would probably be to simply shut him out from further war council meetings, and part was that there was indeed the chance, however slim, that the whole demented scheme might actually _work_.

The Republic did not stand alone against the invaders, for a start. Dotted amongst the ships orbiting the star system's outermost planet, Ulabos, were small, sleek vessels that shone like beacons in the Force. The TSAB auxiliaries the Chief of State had requested had already been deployed in limited engagements several times in order to evaluate their effectiveness against the Vong, and the results, by all accounts, had been somewhere between 'acceptable' and 'awe-inspiring'. Mostly, though, they leaned towards the latter. As an amateur spacecraft enthusiast, Luke rather liked the little warships. The combination of their compact dimensions and astonishing power reminded him comfortably of Master Yoda, for a start... though he rather doubted their commanders would take kindly to their vessels being compared to a wrinkly, malodorous green dwarf, no matter how wise and ancient he had been.

He was considerably less happy about his own civilisation's side of the bargain, though.

The Bureau had initially given them the Spiral Driver blueprints as a goodwill present, but the gift had soon turned sour. Certainly, the gadgets were quick and easy to build – remarkably so, given their size and complexity – and undeniably potent, but none of that had been worth the toll they took on their users. The scientists in charge of their development had attributed it to malign neural feedback, acquired psychosomatic disorders, subatomic radiation, and half a dozen other nonsensical but impressive-sounding explanations, but Luke knew the truth. Weapons powered by raw, furious passion might have been all well and good wherever the Bureau came from, but in this universe, they were nothing more nor less than gigantic dark side magnets.

A fortnight after the first prototype Spiral Driver was put together, the project was cancelled. Of the sixteen operators and test pilots of vehicles adapted to accommodate the devices, four suffered horrifically extensive premature aging, two committed suicide shortly afterwards, and three were rendered completely and irrevocably insane. Even those who had escaped relatively unscathed reported nightmares for some time afterwards, speaking of impossible, mind-shattering beings that bestrode galaxies and fought with the fires of creation themselves. The Bureau had apologised profusely, of course, and offered to provide for the treatment of those affected, but the damage had been done, and collaboration between the two universes had effectively ground to a halt... until, that was, Fey'lya had come up with his 'trade agreement' scheme.

The logic was simple. Spiral Drivers and the vessels that could accommodate them were little other than bad news for the Republic, but in high demand for the Bureau – apparently, the magic that infused their own ships didn't get along very well with Spiral Energy, either (though not quite to the same extent), forcing them to outsource construction of the alleged superweapons. Likewise, whilst the sheer size of the TSAB fleet meant that using any more than a fraction of their forces in a fleet engagement would result in severely diminishing returns, their craft were an inimitable and thus invaluable resource in this universe. Even Borsk's formidable negotiating skills managed to bear fruit for both sides – having their extradimensional allies give more than they were taking went a long way towards repairing their reputation with those who blamed them for (inadvertently or otherwise) leading Chaos to their home.

The problem was not that they were supplying equipment and manpower for enigmatic aliens – Luke considered himself a fairly good judge of character these days (he'd learned a lot from a certain unfortunate incident involving an angry young man, a grotesquely overpowered prototype starship, and a heavily-populated star system or three), and he was fairly sure that the Bureau was being entirely honest with them. Besides, he saw absolutely nothing wrong with putting the Drivers somewhere they might actually have an improved harm-to-good ratio. The problem was that the Republic's leadership wanted to ensure that this was _their_ victory as well as the Bureau's, and had decided to keep a few of the devices for their own use, reasoning that the survival of the galaxy came before the wellbeing of a few crew-members.

Luke didn't like any of it. He didn't like the regime he had helped create using that kind of calculus, even if the Spiral Driver operators were volunteers who had been told of the risks. He didn't like it employing the exact same kind of deranged superweapons he'd spent a good part of his career reducing to gently wafting space debris. Above all, though, he didn't like the dark side being used for _anything_, no matter how innocent or inadvertent. The decision had already been made, though, and all he could do was observe, help out, and run damage control if and when everything started to go horribly wrong.

Administering a few breathing exercises to clear his mind, he sat down in midair and began to enter a meditative trance, drawing a few odd looks from those around him.

They stood on the main observation deck of the _Julia_, an old MC40A light cruiser chosen to host those VIPs sent to watch the battle by dint of its high speed and thick shields. They were a diverse bunch – officers of the TSAB and New Republic Army, Spiral scientists, a small horde of reporters, and even a few politicians from nobody-was-quite-sure-where. The venerable protocol droid C-3PO had been brought in to help smooth over the cultural barriers a little, but after it had been revealed that the mages' Devices served as perfectly adequate translators, he had retreated into the nearest corner to sulk, and had not come out even when it was pointed out that this still didn't change the fact that people from different dimensions didn't really have all that much in common.

Luke slipped deeper into the trance, his mindsight panning outwards. He felt the signatures of both the crewmembers of the Ulabos picket and his students dotted across the system, and was pleased to note that they were keeping their emotions well under control, even if the odd spot of nervousness did leak out from time to time. He pulsed out a reassuringly wordless psychic message to them, and zoomed out again.

To perceive an entire star system at once was to experience an information rush that the untrained human mind simply could not process. Even Luke, for all his years of practice, was sent reeling for a moment before his higher brain functions managed to reassert themselves.

It was impossible to defend every part of something the size of the Coruscant system at once, so the fleet and their commander, Ackbar, had decided not to bother. The Jedi Temple's visions had given them sufficient information about the Yuuzhan Vong force's position and speed of advance to allow a good guess at where and when they would arrive, and so it was that three defensive lines had been formed between Coruscant and the appropriate hyperspace lane entrance. The one at Ulabos was entirely unmanned, as befitted a layout only intended to slow down the enemy, and its minefields and automated defence platforms were all but invisible through the Force. The other two, supporting the main fleet near the gas giants of Stentat and Muscave, bore much clearer signs of life in keeping with their heavier, manned equipment... plus, in the Muscave line's case, a dark, ominous presence that Luke fervently hoped would not have to enter the battle.

Another change of perspective, shifting outwards into deep space... and he saw them.

In many ways, a Yuuzhan Vong fleet was like a negative of an ordinary one. The Vong themselves had no Force-signature; the only way you could detect them was via the dull glow of their living ships and the few, bright sparks of their Chazrach slaves. Whereas a Republic or Remnant fleet was like a dense constellation of clearly-defined points, a Vong one more resembled a hollow, smoky nebula.

In this case, though, it was a very _large_ nebula, and it was coming right for them.

Luke focused on Ackbar's flagship, the _Galactic Voyager_, waiting within the Stentat line behind them.

_Kyp, they're coming. Warn the Supreme Commander._

_Of course, Master Skywalker,_ Kyp Durron replied.

Though Durron had proven himself again and again since the abject disgrace of the Sun Crusher incident, and was far too powerful a Jedi not to include in this operation, Luke had only brought him along with great reluctance. It wasn't that he hadn't forgiven him, because he had, years ago, but because he rather suspected that the amount of dark side energy that would probably be thrown about in the coming battle would prove trying for even the most well-adjusted Force-user, let alone one who had succumbed to it once already. There was a reason that he was the only Jedi Knight in the fleet to have two others on the ship backing him up, and it wasn't just that Cilghal would work well with her uncle, or that Tionne's sheer breadth of knowledge would prove most useful at the admiral's immediate disposal. The leader of the Jedi Order hoped he was wrong, but it only made sense to take a precaution or two anyway.

A surge of energy caused his attention to refocus on the Ulabos line as the first metaphorical shots of the engagement were fired.

The advance fleet, apart from the TSAB ships, was mostly comprised of Interdictors, vessels capable of pulling enemy craft from hyperspace via carefully-deployed gravity-wells. Normally, even the largest Interdictors, such as the customised Star Destroyers that dominated the line, could only ensnare a few enemies, but with the assistance of Spiral Drivers, things became much more interesting.

He opened his eyes, and saw ship after ship begin to manifest a pale green aura as the alien machines boosted their gravity-well projectors. The dark side was there, warm and rich and inviting, but not in the strength he had expected. It was almost as if it was... waiting for something. _And of course, that's not worrying at all..._

"I've got a bad feeling about this," he muttered to himself.

Thousands of kilometres away, the vanguard of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet began its unscheduled arrival in the Coruscant system exactly where the defenders wanted them... right on the outer edge of the Ulabos minefield. Explosions blossomed against the stars as hundreds of the automated weapons homed in on each vessel, crippling everything that was not instantly destroyed.

Then the Bureau contingent joined in.

There were one hundred and sixty extradimensional warships of various sizes in the advance fleet. Each was armed with an Arc-en-ciel, an obscenely powerful technosorcerous artillery piece capable of creating space-time distortions that would tear apart absolutely everything within a hundred-kilometre radius and _most_ things within two hundred. They fired in shifts of forty at a time, staggered so that the first shift would be recharged by the time the last was done. Blue-white beams criss-crossed the space between the fleets, terminating in vast, polychromatic detonations that, even considering the distance, were spectacular enough that when they appeared on the _Julia_'s monitors, almost everyone on the observation deck burst out in spontaneous cheers... except for Luke, who wasn't watching them. At least, not directly.

What preoccupied him more were their _effects_.

Since the Vong did not show up in the Force, it was impossible to see their emotions, their lives preserved in the everlasting power that suffused the galaxy. It was impossible to see them die.

The souls aboard the invasion fleet's vanguard, whose ships had just been so effortlessly demolished... were not Yuuzhan Vong.

A million thoughts assailed him at once. Time had no meaning to the dead. Logic had no meaning, just a manic, confused jumble screamed out with their final breaths. _Peace... laughter... sudden darkness... specks in the sky, what are they? Fear... run... painpainPAIN... so many, so many... where did they come from? Crowded... sick... hurt... so cramped... metal walls everywhere... chase... fear... submission... PAIN... driven like animals, like cattle... loss... mummy, where did you go? Mummy? Hey, aren't those Republic ships? What are they...? Fear... heat... light... pain... death... peace._

_Refugees. They tried to use refugees as living shields, as a ticket of safe passage, and we didn't even notice._

He watched the delighted faces around him, eyes alight with the thrill of victory, and felt sick to his stomach. _They don't know._ Unless the weapons of the Bureau were considerably less effective than he suspected, there wouldn't even be any evidence behind to tell of the thousands of innocent lives that had just been erased from the face of the galaxy.

Luke Skywalker, Master of the Jedi Order, closed his eyes and wept for them. He knew he was the only one who could.

Behind the dying refugees arrived the Yuuzhan Vong themselves, the armoured shells of their bio-ships gleaming in the light of the carnage ahead. Soon they too were in the kill-zone as the TSAB gunners shifted their aim, trying not to catch too much of the minefield in the blast radius of their attacks. With technosorcerous hellfire behind and silent, deadly homing mines everywhere else, the aliens had no choice but to advance and take the punishment they were being served.

One curiosity of a Vong bio-ship was that it didn't use shields, instead employing gravitic distortions created by creatures deep within its hull that absorbed and deflected incoming attacks... and caused the Arc-en-ciels to go absolutely haywire. The beams bent as they encountered the wells, veering off every which way. Two even struck Ulabos itself, chewing into the little planet's surface in a manner that made Luke very relieved the place was uninhabited. Some did get through the enemy's defences, though, and the effects were... memorable.

Three detonations combined into one, a strangely two-dimensional rift forming at their centre whose green-and-purple interior contrasted sharply with both the darkness of space and the multicoloured lightshow surrounding it. It expanded rapidly, dragging ships and mines alike into itself, before collapsing with a pulse of darkness that temporarily blotted out the light of the bombardment. A hundred vessels were gone in an instant, but there were more. There were always more.

The Vong began to make progress, crawling slowly through the minefield. The Republic forces opened fire, the green light of the Spiral Drivers encasing projectile and energy bolt alike. Interdictors were generally much less well-armed than other vessels of their size and class due to the power demands of their gravity well projectors, but the extradimensional tech boosted their firepower to the level of ships-of-the-line. Luke steadied his mind as Master Yoda had taught him and focused on a single proton torpedo, watching as it changed shape mid-flight to something resembling a long, slim drill before boring through the underside of a Yuuzhan Vong cruiser and exploding within with sufficient force to shear the kilometre-and-a-half-long leviathan in two. _Well, that's some subtle symbolism right there, then._

The gravity fields the living ship projected hadn't seemed to affect its fate at all.

He touched the Force, and felt the dark side there as always, but it was still oddly subdued. _I would have at least expected some sort of stir from the dead civilians, and it's not being suppressed by anything, either – quite the opposite, in fact. Just what is going on here?_

As the alien fleet finally managed to get in range with its own weapons, another function of the Spiral Drivers became apparent. Pulsating green walls appeared before those vessels fitted with them, growing brighter as they absorbed fire from the Vong ships before collapsing into devastating shot-ranged blasts of their own, employing the enemy's own strength against them. Most of the crowd 'ooh'ed and 'aah'ed at all the pretty lights whilst others made notes on anything that came to hand. Some, though, were less sanguine.

"Something's going to give," General Wedge Antilles opined from beside Luke, and the Jedi Master nodded in agreement.

_There's no way we can win this easily._ Though the battle thus far was almost painfully one-sided, he knew that it would take only one little thing to shift the balance... and in accordance with laws more ancient than the galaxy, that was precisely what happened.

Three Force-sparks emerged from the minefield, dancing through the apocalyptic fire-fight with animal grace. Luke focused on them, and saw sleek, insectoid creatures the size of starfighters, their primitive minds awash with frenzied hunger. They homed in on the centre of one of the TSAB bombardment squadrons, jinking from side to side to avoid the barrage of point-defence fire directed at them. One vanished in an enormous fireball, a Republic fighter wiggling its S-foils in victory as it flew past. One was caught in the sights of seven turrets at once, literally falling apart mid-flight as the magically-enhanced bullets tore through it.

The last landed on the underbelly of one of the Bureau cruisers before burrowing inside... just as the ship was preparing to fire its Arc-en-ciel.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then an explosion blossomed from the Ulabos line, temporarily shorting out the sensors of everything within a thousand kilometres. The entire eight-strong squadron was destroyed instantly, followed rapidly by over eighty other Bureau and Republic vessels and countless starfighters. Luke rocked backwards, the weight of their deaths sweeping over him like a tidal wave.

The Vong were quick to exploit their enemies' momentary confusion, pounding apart ships and defence platforms alike with their bizarre magma cannons. They had started to exit the minefield faster than they were being destroyed, and the consensus amongst the surviving defenders was clear. _Time to go._

The Republic vessels departed first, with the _Julia_ in the lead; its captain saw no sense in exposing his VIP contingent to immediate danger any longer than was necessary. The TSAB ships stayed behind alongside the automated defences to provide covering fire and further delay the enemy... for about ten minutes. After the second Vong-initiated Arc-en-ciel misfire wiped out a third of their remaining craft, they just fled for their lives.

Battered and bruised, the advance fleet limped back to the Stentat line, an armada of very angry aliens on their tail. Losing Ulabos might have always been part of the plan, but Luke still wished less people had died in the process. _Ackbar, I hope you know what you're doing._

**********

* * *

**

**Author's Notes:** Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the weird, weird world of the Doorstop, now with extra space battles and mythology gags! (Warning: may cause brain damage).

Yes, I am aware that referring to the Star Wars Expanded Universe's friendly neighbourhood sadomasochists as just 'Vong' is a grievous insult. Given the drastically reduced getting-to-know-you time in this version of the invasion, though, it's unlikely that the Republic does... and even if they did, would they care in the slightest? Somehow, I doubt it.


	33. Debut Outing

**32. Debut Outing**

_Master Skywalker. Master Skywalker, are you there?_

Preoccupied as he was, the Jedi didn't notice the voice for two whole minutes despite its increasing insistence. He was deep within a Battle Meditation trance, his consciousness spread thinly across the fleet. It was a power Luke was particularly fond of these days – subtle and not overly aggressive, and yet incredibly useful when employed properly. It enervated and demoralised the enemy whilst emboldening and energising one's allies, allowing them to operate at peak performance. Unsurprisingly, Luke preferred the second half of that. It was surprising how physical space combat could get, especially when you were pulling ridiculously high Gs in a starfighter, and the boost in stamina and mental acuity was useful for everyone else as well. The bad news, though, was that when you were listening in on a thousand different orders and communications at once, most of them having nothing to do with you, it took a little while to register other matters even when one of your pupils was metaphorically screaming in your ear.

_What is it, Kyp?_

_Message from the Supreme Commander. He wants you to concentrate your attention on the area around the defence platforms. We're beginning evacuation protocols in preparation for a retreat to Muscave._

_Understood. I'll let the others know too._

The news did not surprise Luke. Even with the benefit of the alien technology they had been granted, they were slowly being pushed back. The number of Yuuzhan Vong ships destroyed had surely crept well into four figures by now, but still they kept coming. Worse, they had started to bring in their big guns.

Near the back of the advancing fleet was an enormous vessel shaped like an over-inflated spiral galaxy, easily ten kilometres across and escorted by four similarly huge dreadnoughts that resembled little more than jumbled, asymmetric stacks of hemispherical domes, each six kilometres in height. Together, the dreadnought squadron laid down a blanket of firepower that not even a Spiral Driver-equipped Star Destroyer could resist for more than a minute or so, whilst launching waves of fighters that blotted out the stars. Though the purpose of weakening the defences of the area around Coruscant had indeed been to lure in more of the enemy's forces than they could afford to lose, Luke couldn't help but feel that maybe they had succeeded a little too well.

He was far from the only one employing the Force to affect the tide of battle. Those who were not applying their precognition and enhanced senses to supply the commanders of their ships with up-to-the-minute (or, indeed, up-to-the-next-five-minutes) intelligence were utilising their unique talents in rather more creative ways.

Tionne had accelerated her thought processes to the point where she became a living war computer, capable of processing and formulating and processing hundreds of different tactics and strategies simultaneously, whilst Tresina Lobi, a promising young Chev illusionist, had somehow managed to sneak an entire squadron of MC90 cruisers into the middle of the fleet, where they were happily unloading their considerable firepower into all and sundry without anyone paying them the slightest bit of attention. At a gentle suggestion from Luke, they began to focus their efforts on the main defensive line... except for Lobi, who appeared to be trying to insert her ship up a blissfully oblivious Vong battlecruiser's exhaust port for reasons that entirely eluded him.

Apart from the automated stations, which were basically turbolaser batteries with generators and rudimentary targeting computers bolted on, the manned portion of the Stentat line consisted of sixteen ancient Golan defence platforms, varying between one and two kilometres in length and patched and customised to a point where they bore very little resemblance to their original design. They did have more sophisticated equipment in the system, especially the newer-model Golans orbiting Coruscant itself, but with the limited time they had been given to prepare, they had had to make do with whatever they could get.

Ships were crowded around the huge space stations, the situation on board exactly as chaotic as one would expect when attempting to evacuate several thousand crew members in a short space of time... until Luke's Battle Meditation kicked in there like sunlight shining through the clouds of panic, confusion, and desperation. Order began to reassert itself as beleaguered officers began to think clearly once more and exhausted rescue teams gained a second wind, carrying out their duties like fresh, enthusiastic recruits all over again. He felt movements in the Force around him as his students contributed their own efforts, further easing the process, and was relieved to note that the change in focus had not compromised the rest of their defence too greatly.

Others had made sure of that.

Given how spectacularly their previous methods had backfired, the remaining TSAB ships had switched tactics. They were engaged in a brutal close-range knife-fight with the forward edge of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet, employing their superior speed and firepower to launch devastating hit-and-run attacks deep into the enemy. Though their point-defence turrets were not intended for fleet engagements, and couldn't even match an ordinary Republic ship-of-the-line, let alone one upgraded with Spiral Driver technology, their commanders' magic made up for it in ways that put even the Jedi to shame.

Attack spells could disable living ships with just a couple of shots, leaving them helpless in the face of the defenders' guns, and that was even before you got into the various terrifying uses of binds, teleportation, and shield-rams. Stentat had attracted a great deal of space debris into its orbit in the Coruscant system's millennia of habitation, and while something as tiny as a detached screw from a starship or a stray micrometeoroid was thoroughly innocuous on its own, having several billion of them scooped up by a supernatural energy field and propelled at your ship at relativistic speeds was considerably more worrisome, especially when you remembered that an object approaching the speed of light starts converting further acceleration into mass instead. There were many things about the Battle of Coruscant that Luke imagined he would eventually forget, but seeing three tiny Bureau frigates working in concert to rip a Star Destroyer-sized battlecruiser in half with a cosmic dust-storm was not one of them.

The thing was, he rather suspected that he and several of his more advanced students could perform similarly lethal feats if they tried. The battleship-disabling energy blasts, not so much, but he could undoubtedly rig up something fairly spectacular with some telekinesis and a bit of preparation time, especially if he used precognition to guide his aim. He chose not to, though.

It wasn't a matter of morality. He was quite aware that for all their innocuousness, his powers were currently helping the Republic forces kill a great number of sentient creatures, and was too honest with himself to hide behind the excuse that he was merely ensuring his allies' safety. It was simply that using the Force to dominate and destroy was of the dark side, whilst using it to preserve and protect was of the light, and he didn't think that getting addicted to a power that would inexorably turn him into a gibbering, homicidal megalomaniac would be terribly useful to anyone, least of all himself.

Morality, as usual, was far more complicated than the simple black-and-white of the Force. On the one hand, the current operation was greatly beneficial to the safety and security of the galaxy and its residents – the Yuuzhan Vong had butchered their way from the Outer rim to the centre of the galaxy, and since politely asking them to stop doing it didn't seem to be working very well, more forcible methods of dissuasion were clearly required. On the other, butchering them right back left an unpleasant taste in his mouth... and this was definitely butchery, no doubt about it. Destroyed ships were littered all the way to the edge of the system, each having once contained hundreds of crew (presumably, at least – their Force-invisibility made it hard to tell), and that was discounting the thousands of starfighters that they had swatted aside like insects.

In the end, Luke had to fall back on the justification he had used for the destruction of the Death Stars, the _Tarkin_, the _Eclipse_, and all the other enormous death-machines the Empire had thrown at him over the years. Thousands might have died, even millions, but trillions were saved as a result. He felt an uncharacteristically sour smile creep across his face as he realised that this was precisely the sort of reasoning he had so opposed in the employment of the Spiral Drivers. _Jedi hypocrisy? How novel._

That was the other disadvantage of Battle Meditation – it tended to get you philosophising.

At least they had given the aliens an out. A TSAB translation team were stationed aboard the _Galactic Voyager_, monitoring their transmissions for anything resembling a message of surrender. Unfortunately, they had had nothing so far except proclamations of Yuuzhan Vong superiority and eye-wateringly creative insults, judging from what Luke had heard while he inadvertently listened in, but the fact that there was discourse of any level going on was surely an encouraging sign.

He returned his attention to the battle; there was only so much Vong swearing the human mind could take. As usual, the TSAB were not having everything go their way. One place where their ships most definitely did not outstrip the Republic's was in shielding, and whilst they could partially make up for this with their magic, that meant they couldn't use it for anything else while they were protecting themselves – such as, for instance, getting rid of whatever was currently shooting at them. One by one, they were steadily being crippled or destroyed, either by torrential magma cannon fire, by the strange borer-beetle living weapons, or by rocky missiles guided by the enemy's gravitic fields.

The aliens were disturbingly coordinated, reacting to the mages' stratagems with a speed no ordinary sentient could muster. A foray into their midst would find itself the target of a perfectly-executed pincer manoeuvre, whilst an attempted retreat would soon be blocked by a wing of starfighters or worse. As others had reported in prior engagements, it was as if they were being guided by a single, transcendent intelligence... and knowing Vong biotech, they probably were.

As they were pushed back, the Bureau began to get desperate. There was a flash of light, and Luke watched incredulously as a single cruiser, trailing debris and barely holding together, teleported directly above the enemy's vast spiral-shaped flagship. Its intent was clear – either fire its Arc-en-ciel into the dreadnought squadron at point-blank range, or overload it with precisely the same effect. Charging rings began to emerge between the focusing fins on its prow, and excess energy crackled across its ruined hull as the mighty weapon began its slow activation process.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the Vong had figured that out as well.

A gigantic tentacle lashed out from the world-ship's upper hull, its lamprey-like mouth clamping onto the crippled intruder. It whipped back and forth with enough force to liquefy any crew still alive, before hurling its prey back towards the Republic forces. It didn't get all the way before the abused Arc-en-ciel detonated, and quite a few smaller Yuuzhan Vong vessels were caught in the blast, but the dreadnoughts remained unharmed.

Luke didn't have to check with Tionne to know what was coming next. They wouldn't be able to hold long enough to get the Golans' crew to safety, and that meant that Ackbar was going to have to deploy their trump card early. Which he duly did.

From behind distant Muscave, the dark presence began to move. Nineteen kilometres of sleek, dagger-like warship traversed the distance between the two planets with impossible speed, its hull burning with green fire as it casually molested the laws of physics. The _Lusankya_ had arrived.

Since the bad old days of the Galactic Empire, the Republic's few captured Super Star Destroyers had increasingly taken a back seat in military operations. Inefficient, unwieldy, and nigh-impossible to maintain, they were nevertheless amongst the biggest, nastiest things ever to stalk the void, and sometimes, that was exactly what was needed.

Even by the standards of those mighty vessels, the _Lusankya_ had had a busy history. It had gone from Palpatine's (appropriately over-the-top) escape craft hidden underground on Coruscant to the Remnant's most brutal and notorious prison before serving as one of the Republic's ultimate weapons for the next thirteen years, during which time it had racked up a suitably impressive combat record. In this battle, though, it was fulfilling a rather different role.

The crew had been reduced to a skeleton of three thousand, scarcely enough to man the dreadnought's weapons and other systems even given the upgrades the Republic scientists had installed since its capture. Its starfighter bays were gone, as were a good portion of the crew quarters and anything else deemed non-essential. In their place were Spiral Drivers. Lots of Spiral Drivers.

The average _Imperial-II_ Star Destroyer fitted for Driver usage had approximately four hundred of the devices, all networked together and linked to its bridge. The _Lusankya_, on the other hand, had over _twelve thousand_. It made its presence known before it was within ten thousand kilometres of the battle, its Spiral-enhanced turbolaser batteries hammering into the enemy with devastating force. The Vong line simply disintegrated, an instant passageway forming towards their own dreadnoughts.

As it slowed down to an ordinary combat speed, the Super Star Destroyer's aura only intensified. The shots from its weapons increasingly resembled glowing, ethereal drills rather than the usual invisible beams, and the ship itself almost seemed to be changing shape as it advanced.

Then he looked closer, and realised that it wasn't an optical illusion at all.

The _Lusankya_ slowly tilted forward, its bow dipping until it was perpendicular to its angle of advance. The light brightened yet further until Luke had to avert his gaze, and when he turned back, the dreadnought he recognised was entirely gone.

In its place was a gargantuan, spindly figure that managed to tower over the battlefield despite the three-dimensional nature of space combat. In some ways, it resembled an exploded diagram of the vessel, its internal structure forming the comparatively small, bulbous body whilst the angular outer hull had become the limbs and loose armour plating – especially the massive, oversized forearms and shoulders, the former of which were almost twice as long as the rudimentary legs in and of themselves. Beside Luke, General Antilles rounded on the nearest Spiral scientist, demanding an explanation, but the other man could only shake his head mutely.

The thing that had once been the _Lusankya_ paused for a moment, seemingly drinking in the effect its presence was having on the battle's participants – but only for a moment. Its turbolasers fired again, the barrage of phantom drills clearing away the last obstructions between it and the dreadnought squadron in a wave of explosions, before the vessel itself charged through, the tiny head formed from its bridge panning back and forth in a way that would have been comical if it had been anything other than a kilometres-tall engine of destruction with one of the ugliest Force-presences Luke had ever encountered.

The dark side was back, and in full force.

One of the Vong flagship's dome-pile escorts was the first to die. The titanic mech stabbed out a blade-like forearm towards it, hundreds of jagged drills erupting from its tip and burying themselves within the living vessel. The doomed ship's hull contorted grotesquely for a moment, and then it burst like an overripe fruit as the drills expanded outwards. Luke felt the deaths of the Chazrach on board, chased down by masses of jet-black, razor-tipped tendrils through the corridors of their dying home, and could not suppress a shudder. _Nothing_ deserved to have its life ended like that.

The drills retracted, and the _Lusankya_-thing was on the world-ship in an instant. The flagship's feeder tentacle lashed out as it had against the Bureau kamikaze, but it was caught in a single, enormous claw and ripped from its owner's body, along with a good portion of the hull. The mech opened its arms and screeched in triumph, the sheer psychic pressure of the cry driving people across the fleet to their knees despite the lack of air to carry it.

Then the dark side struck, and things suddenly got a great deal worse.

What had once been seductive and accommodating became stifling and sickly-sweet as the diabolic energy poured into the _Lusankya_, the residual echoes of the pain and death the vessel had born witness to over the years proving more than sufficient when combined with the amplifying effect of the Spiral Drivers. It changed once more, going from something mechanical to a far more organic appearance as the Spiral Energy around it switched colours from green to sickly violet. An enormous, fanged mouth emerged from its chest, and it bit into the world-ship, worrying at it like a dog. Drill-tendrils emerged from all over its body, stabbing into its prey and everything else it could reach.

That was on the visual, physical level. On the metaphysical level, things were both far less pleasant and far less explicitly describable. One could speak of three thousand souls screaming out in agony, of a scent of rotting meat and fresh blood, of geometries that hurt the eyes to look upon and suggested images so blasphemous, so depraved, and so terribly _inviting_ that they didn't even need something to blaspheme against. None of these were truly adequate, though, to record for posterity the birth of a dark god.

Luke saw it all. He fell backwards, blood seeping from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and scarcely even noticed when he hit the ground. All around him was chaos. The Spiral Wedge had attempted to interrogate was shrieking at the top of his voice, his face blotchy and his eyes wild.

"ANTI-SPIRAL! KILL IT! KILL IT NOW!"

The Jedi kept slipping in and out of consciousness, his attention split between the mayhem of the observation deck and the carnage outside. Visuals had gone, followed shortly by comms, a sphere of night spreading out from the _Lusankya_'s last known position and engulfing everything in its path. The Force was still there, but this was not exactly an advantage as the deaths continued to filter in. They were not just Chazrach or Vong any more, but Republic troops as well, killed as their ships either came under attack from the transmuted dreadnought or followed its example. Confusion and terror laced the battlefield, only serving to feed the monstrous entity at its heart.

An idle, detached part of his brain wondered what seeing the leader of the Jedi Order in a twitching, bloody heap on the floor was doing for morale. _Probably not much more than everything else._

He chanted a calming mantra with feverish conviction, holding onto it like a lifeline in a storm and battling through the agony and madness that pressed down on his increasingly-fragile mind. He could not afford to wait this out in peaceful oblivion – the fleet would need coordination if it was to survive this, and without ordinary communications...

There were a cluster of bright lights in the darkness, remarkably unaffected by the apocalyptic goings-on around them. _The Bureau._ He focused on them, opening a telepathic link as he had when their scouts first entered his universe.

_This is Master Luke Skywalker of the New Republic. Can you hear me?_

_Loud and clear, Skywalker._ The mage sounded almost bored. _Looks like that hypertech the brass were going on about hasn't worked out so well. I'm Commander Meriva, by the way. Commodore Lacetti's head exploded when big ugly there started piling on the crazy. Very messy._

_I think we can save the introductions for another time, Meriva. Any suggestions on how to stop this thing?_

_Sure thing, boss-man. Synchronised Arc-en-ciel bombardment oughta do the trick. Need some cover while we're prepping it, though – leastways, unless the plan's for us to act as extra-temporary light sources and lift the gloom a little. Always happy to oblige._

Luke could only gape. _This course of action has a good chance of explosively atomising you, and you're cracking _jokes _about it? Are all Bureau personnel like you, commander?_

A raspy chuckle. _Nah – s'pose not. Turns out my ex was an Ancient Belkan artefact weapon, see. Nice guy, but not so great at dealing with the whole 'rejection' business. Compared to that, some weird-looking spaceship's just a walk in the park. Least they don't vape your son's pet wyvern when you stop returning their calls. Probably, anyway. Does that'n look like the wyvern-vaping sort to you? Never mind. You give your boys a call, boss. They provide the starters, and we'll handle the main course._

_Understood, commander._ He cut the link, shaking his head in disbelief. _Mad. They're all completely mad._

Next stop was the _Galactic Voyager_, and it was rather easier this time. The mind-violating interference had not lessened, but he was more used to it now. Whether this was a good or bad thing, he was not entirely sure. As expected, Kyp was quite thoroughly out of action, paralysed by flashbacks to Carida, whilst Cilghal had gone from doctor to patient thanks to her advanced empathic abilities backfiring horribly.

That left Tionne.

_Archivist Solusar, are you all right?_

_M-master Luke?_

_Well, you're in better shape than anyone else, at least. Sorry for the bluntness – dark-side-infected giant on a rampage, you know. I've got an idea on how to destroy it, but it'll need the fleet's help. Warn Ackbar, and try to get in touch with the rest of the students. We need to lay down a lot of suppressive fire on the _Lusankya_. I'll leave the specifics to you and him._

_D-destroy it? The crew..._

_Are already dead!_ It was not said in a hysterical manner – veteran Jedi Masters did not get hysterical. Just... agitated. Very, very agitated, in this case. He softened. _I'm sorry, Tionne, but right now we need to focus on saving those we can. Can you do that?_

_I... think so._

Luke smiled, hoping the expression would convey itself down the link. _Don't worry – it's only a superweapon. You know what happens to those around here._

He tried to extend his perception as he had before, but met with limited success. Doing that left your mind dangerously exposed, and there was only so far he was prepared to go in an environment like the one he found himself in. As such, all he could do was wait until a sizable number of Republic ships appeared to be shooting in the same direction before alerting Meriva.

_Commander, you have your cover. Fire when ready._

_Sure thing, boss, _the Bureau man replied with his usual cheery flippancy. _Regular or extra-fine?_

_Whatever gets the job done. We-_

_Boss-man? Skywalker? You there?_

Luke could not reply. The pressure had doubled – tripled, even. It was all he could do to preserve his sanity, let alone continue a conversation. _It found me. By the Force, it found me._

The _Julia_ lurched, an impact shuddering through its hull and knocking the observation deck passengers to the ground. There was... _something_ at the window, all eyes and teeth and inky, writhing blackness, tracing long, lazy scratches across the metre-thick transparisteel. It was painfully obvious that the precautions he had taken whilst employing his supernatural senses had been far from adequate.

The light cruiser continued to shake, the engines' howls of protest audible even over the screaming of the passengers. _We're being drawn in. I shall not fear. I shall not fear. I shall not fear..._

Voices began to whisper inside his head, alien and incomprehensible, yet not requiring anything so crude as mortal language to convey their message. He saw himself as leader of the galaxy. He saw himself as the saviour of billions. He saw himself with his father, his aunt and his uncle at his side. He saw...

"M... mother?"

_Luke... we can help you. We can bring her back. We can bring them all back. We can let you see her. See her as you never did in life. You are strong. You are worthy. Join us. Become one with us. Become our Herald, and you will have everything. Everything you ever wanted..._

The dream shattered, cleansing blue-white light shining through the cracks. The _Lusankya_-thing screeched once more, this time in terrible, outraged pain. The creature's appendage was gone, and so was the shroud it had cast. It bucked and flailed in space, the weapons of a thousand Republic warships striking it again and again. A glowing octagon hung in front of it, a Bureau cruiser at each corner. Luke's vision whited out once more as the technosorcerous vessels fired, the beams from their Arc-en-ciels converging into a single, devastating bolt that struck the _Lusankya_ right in its open maw.

The resultant explosion was... well, 'awe-inspiring' didn't quite do it justice. Luke watched for a few moments, then flopped backwards, passing out before he hit the deck.

He'd had a long day.

* * *

"Is this... accurate?" Admiral Ackbar, Supreme Commander of the New Republic Military, asked slowly.

"Near as we can tell, sir," the Bureau officer by the vid-screen replied.

The Mon Calamari wheezed out a long, heavy breath as he tried to compose himself. This course of action was logical, really. The infected _Lusankya_ had done the most damage to the Vong fleet – not out of discrimination, but because it had just happened to be in the middle of it when everything went wrong – and it was the Republic and their allies who had destroyed it and done most of the cleaning-up afterwards. Fortunately, the remaining tainted ships had posed rather less difficulty than their progenitor. Furthermore, the survival of most of the Interdictors ensured that the still-living aliens had nowhere to run.

It was just that he hadn't really expected much in the way of 'logical' from the Yuuzhan Vong.

"Very well. Patch him through, and keep translating."

The face that appeared on the screen was not exactly prepossessing. Heavy-browed, with a vestigial nose and almost lipless mouth whose large, sharp teeth were permanently bared in a snarling expression, it looked more like some seedy petty raider dressing to impress than the commander of a galaxy-crushing fleet, and the extensive scarring and tattoo-work did it no favours either. Until, that was, one looked into the eyes, which were possessed of an ancient cunning and weary grief.

"I am Acting Warmaster Czulkang Lah of the Yuuzhan Vong," it growled in a voice that even by Mon Calamari standards seemed in desperate need of a throat pastille or ten. "I wish to discuss our surrender."

"Then this is unexpected news, but not unwelcome," Ackbar replied. "I am Admiral Ackbar of the Republic. Why 'acting warmaster', may I ask?"

The Vong's reply was calm and measured, with an almost heartbreaking dignity to it. "My son was in the Koros-Strohna that your... creature devoured. As were several thousand others, warriors and civilians alike. I opposed this crusade from the beginning, Admiral. I knew the winged one was feeding us untruths. Even so, I did not know that we would be facing gods and demons in this galaxy. _What have you unleashed here_?"

_I might well ask the same question,_ the admiral thought, looking out across the devastation the _Lusankya_ had left behind. They had blunted the invaders' advance to the point where the leader of their entire armed forces (if he remembered his intelligence data correctly) was prepared to surrender to them, and yet it still didn't feel like a victory, and not just because the aliens would most likely recruit another Warmaster and attack with renewed vigour rather than giving up entirely. Two thirds of the fleet assigned to defend Coruscant were gone, most of them when the Spiral Drivers had gone haywire, and after Luke Skywalker's tacit warnings, he had a good idea of why it had happened.

The old Mon Calamari was a great believer in the power of the Force. Many of his closest friends wielded the mysterious energy, not to mention his own beloved niece Cilghal, and he had lost count of how many times the Jedi had used it to save them since the Battle of Yavin. To envisage a galaxy in which it did not exist, to actually _hope_ for such a thing to come to pass, was... unthinkable.

Unless, of course, you had seen what _other_ things the Force could do. Things like the aftermath of a Dark Jedi's handiwork, when you realised that some of the things you were looking at had once been alive. Things like good people becoming monsters, like the longest-lived and most stable regime in galactic history getting turned into a nightmare in scant years by a single mild-mannered politician. Things, in fact, like a miracle weapon going berserk and killing several thousand people under your command... and leaving you relieved that it was only that few.

_Good grief, I'm starting to think like Fey'lya. I need a bath. Quickly._

He cleared his throat, and turned back to the screen. "Very well, Warmaster, I am prepared to accept your offer. We will, of course, have to discuss several formalities, but..."

For the next hour, the two old warriors engaged in negotiations that would shape history. Outside, the scant mortal remains of hundreds of thousands drifted through space, just another small addition to the geography of the ancient star system.

The Battle of Coruscant was over. The Yuuzhan Vong War was not.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** And this, kiddies, is why you should never, under any circumstances, let a _Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann _fan watch _Bokurano_. Unpleasantness ensues.

Given how easy a time of it they were having thanks to the gods' assistance, I imagine quite a lot of the Yuuzhan Vong brass were in the invasion fleet's vanguard by the Battle of Coruscant – anything to grab a share of the glory before the Republic was completely flattened. Oh, and if you're wondering about the lack of detail and intimate involvement in this battle, that's because it's a sideshow, a preview of what's yet to come. In the words of Randy Bachman, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Speaking of, I'm afraid it'll be a little while until the next update. I'm buried in university-work at the moment, and besides, while I am indeed still writing, I need to put it all through the beta-ing process before posting it online to maintain the quality (limited though it is) that my readers have come to expect. In the meantime... well, you know my opinions on reviews, so I won't bore you with that again.

Hope you enjoyed what's here so far, and I'll get back as soon as I can!


	34. Belief

**33. Belief**

Itsuki Koizumi, official second-in-command and yes-man of the SOS Brigade, was, at the age of seventeen, quite possibly the esper Organisation's most accomplished operative.

He had participated in nine successful covert operations ranging from kidnapping to assassination, four against beings not entirely or even remotely human, and logged over five hundred hours of combat (average battle duration: ten minutes) against the bizarre creatures inadvertently brought forth by Haruhi Suzumiya's overactive imagination. He spoke thirteen languages, had legal citizenship in six countries, and was trained to an academic level of expertise in the customs and social mores of five more. He could recite the works of several dozen philosophers and theologists by heart (professed favourites: Nietzsche and Sartre, causing his handlers no end of worry), and possessed advanced qualifications in karate, aikido, and silat, not to mention in the use of approximately sixty different kinds of firearm, some of which would not be invented for the next thirty years. Finally, he could correctly perform over three hundred interrogation techniques of varying legality, including a deeply unpleasant little number involving a teapot, a slice of lemon, two jump-leads, and _absolutely nothing else_ that had been partially responsible for the Organisation's discovery of the extradimensional infiltrators in its midst.

He had not possessed what would generally be termed an 'ordinary childhood' since he was two-and-a-quarter years old.

All these factors combined provided more than enough explanation for his eventual placement as the point-man on the Suzumiya detail. None of them, however, explained why he had volunteered in the first place.

The truth was, Itsuki believed in magic. Not the simple, functional, and oh-so-limited forms of magic he saw every day, the magic that allowed him to soar through the skies as a being of living flame in the strange pocket-dimensions of closed space, and muster the occasional, barely-visible glow around his fingertips in the grey mundanity of the real world. He believed in the magic of handsome princes, beautiful princesses, and wise and ancient spirits. He believed in the wild, untamed magic that could change a man's form at will, or cage his soul in bars of air and light and love. In short, he believed in fairy-tales, and all the things associated in them, even as his profession sculpted him into a machine of charm, intelligence, and carefully-applied bloodshed.

Whenever he found or was allowed a moment of spare time, he would immediately dive deep within the hoard of books he had borrowed, stolen, or bought with someone else's money, escaping to other worlds in a manner rather more figurative than was usual for an esper-in-training. The eclectic means of acquisition naturally resulted in similarly eclectic reading patterns – everything from the ancient adapted myths of the _Metamorphoses_ and _Zi Bu Yu_ to post-industrial morality tales and the forerunners of the many-formed fantasy genre. All had been devoured with the same terrifying speed, before being squirreled away like some fantastical dragon's treasure.

One of his most bountiful sources of fresh stories had in fact been one of his handlers, providing his first demonstration of just how little could be hidden from the Organisation's operatives. The handler in question was a friendly, intelligent, and remarkably literate young man, and so it was only to be expected that he was directly (if accidentally) responsible for the adolescent Koizumi noticing that he was attracted to those of his own sex, three years after the Organisation's analysts had picked up on it.

There were a lot of factors leading to the incident that made the book donations stop. Teenage hormones and teenage awkwardness were the most obvious, accompanied by a dearth of genuine, human affection from any other source and the innumerable other, little things that separated an Organisation adoptee from an ordinary child of any sexuality. Itsuki had little use for Freudian psychology beyond its capacity for weirding out one's audience when injected into one's daily fauxlosophic monologues, but the textbook example of an Oedipus/Electra complex he'd somehow managed to run straight into did make him wonder sometimes.

Whatever the case, he could remember what happened with perfect clarity... which was odd, since he saw little use in the memory other than fodder for the occasional bit of casual self-deprecation. "When I was fourteen, I tried to seduce one of my surrogate parents" was such a _magnificent_ conversation-stopper, after all.

He had never tried it on Kyon, though. Sometimes, that look of fascinated horror he was so good at provoking in people wasn't nearly as fun as it usually was.

The room had been wholly nondescript – another cheap hotel serving as a front company for the Organisation. He'd been sitting on the bed when the door opened, picking dried blood from under his fingernails as he slowly came down from the high of the last mission. There hadn't been a moment of thought or consideration to it – he'd simply rushed over and embraced the older man, standing on tip-toes to give him a kiss that was nervous and enthusiastic in equal measure.

The operative's hand had been gentle but firm as he pushed Itsuki away, and his smile had been more tired and sad than anything else when he placed his latest offering, a collection of works by a Danish author named Hans Christian Andersen, on the table beside the door. The young esper could still see the book's glossy cover in his mind's eye, its pastel shades faintly reflecting the hotel-room lights. His benefactor did not say a single word as he turned around and exited the room, and Itsuki never saw him again.

Later, when he actually read that last book, he wondered if his handler had been trying to tell him something beforehand. The stories of failure and heartbreak, where life went on as the magic died, could easily be seen as a subtle suggestion to put aside childish things and face the real world – whatever that happened to be.

It had not worked. Two years later, he had been deployed to North High School, was near-literally headhunted by a hyperactive teenage deity, and had promptly found himself up to his eyeballs in exactly the sort of supernatural weirdness that he craved. It didn't matter that his job was to prevent the aforementioned weirdness from getting dangerously out of hand – he was at the heart of the universe now, the birthplace of miracles. He had travelled through time and space, fought incomprehensible beings, and almost witnessed the end of everything, with only an enigmatic alien computer, a shy, sweetly ineffectual time-traveller, and a smartmouthed, unpowered student to watch his proverbial back, and he had loved every moment... apart from the business with the recursive time loop and the overdue homework. No job was perfect, after all.

Then Kyon had disappeared and been replaced, and everything went straight to hell.

They had never seen it coming – in fact, he still had no idea beyond a general timeframe about when the switch had taken place. The clues had all been there, but hidden under so much of the white noise the SOS Brigade usually experienced that they were only visible in hindsight. The surprise Canada trip had been odd, but not _that_ far outside the norm, and the relative quietness of the next couple of weeks had helped allay any lingering suspicions. Likewise, the developments in Kyon and Haruhi's relationship had been neither unexpected nor unwelcome (even if he'd had to repeat the last bit to himself a couple of times before he entirely believed it), and if the latter had been a little more subdued than usual... well, that just meant less work for the rest of them. Not that Itsuki particularly objected to that work, but it was only polite to take everyone else's feelings into consideration. It was only after nineteen esper cells and a still-unknown number of time-travellers had vanished in a single night that they had realised something might be wrong, and by then, it was far too late.

That was how the human supernatural community had learned about it, anyway. Itsuki was not privy to the inner workings of the Integrated Data Entity's alien mind, but he would have placed a considerable amount of money on the god-computer knowing beforehand. _Probably thought it would make an interesting natural experiment, _he mused bitterly.

Whilst his semi-voluntary escape from his home universe had resulted in a significantly decreased chance of getting his upper torso bitten off by a Chaos infiltrator disguised as a waiter (an experience he suspected he would be reliving for years to come), being the sole representative of his civilisation in another dimension had not been much fun either – particularly once the TSAB reluctantly decided that the dimensional space around the Suzumiyaverse was now too treacherous for them to continue sending aid. He remembered lobbying frantically to obtain support for Yuki Nagato's madcap scheme for a last-ditch blockade run. He remembered staying awake throughout the night of the relief force's departure, hoping against hope that his own contributions of vague local knowledge and second-hand threat assessment might somehow prove useful. Most of all, though, he remembered the sight that had greeted him upon their return.

Though one hundred and fifty thousand people was a pathetic amount when considered as a percentage of an entire planet's population, it became a whole lot more significant when you were trying to ferry them all down to the surface in as little time as possible via the largest spaceport you could requisition, especially when half the new arrivals (and a fair measure of their rescuers) were in need of urgent medical assistance. Battered, scarred warships were stacked above the landing field, dipping up and down to deposit their living cargo with almost balletic grace, a small city's worth of refugees being herded (or, in some cases, carried) towards the staging areas and the officials assigned to process them.

Even those who could walk usually had something wrong with them. Some were hunched in on themselves, trying to hide the mutilations, missing limbs, and bizarre mutations that were the all-too-common legacy of exposure to a hostile, Chaos-tainted environment. Others were hypersensitive to their surroundings, jumping at the slightest unexpected movement and regarding the wide open space they were in with abject terror. Yet others stared around vacuously, their gait sluggish and tentative, their eyes uncomprehending. Director Sheng, their nominal leader, had told him later that those last ones had simply experienced a 'general system error' (his words), their minds outright refusing to accept a world where the sky was clear, the landscape was pristine, and every little thing in visual range was not a potential threat.

"But it was only three weeks since we left!" Itsuki had exclaimed, aghast. "How did you all get hit so hard so fast?"

"Weeks? It was _weeks_ to you?"

That was how they had discovered Chaos's time-distortion capabilities, an invaluable tactical asset that the Entity had, again, failed to inform them of. _What a surprise._

He had never really integrated with the other Suzumiyaverse evacuees. They stood apart, united by shared experience he could not even begin to guess at. Sometimes, he wondered if they resented him, the one who had deserted them before the battle truly began, but he never asked. It wasn't a question he really wanted an answer to.

The work he had taken on after the evacuation had been a self-imposed obligation, a way to pass the time, keep his sanity, and muster some sort of apology whether its recipients wanted it or not. Much of it was secretarial, greasing the wheels of the makeshift government-in-exile his compatriots had assembled, but more important was the liaison work with the Bureau. One way or another, he had ended up as the human face of the Suzumiyaverse, and he was fully prepared to exploit this for everything it was worth.

After the disembarkation, their benefactors had assigned them to the edge of the steadily-expanding refugee district south of Mid-Childa's capital, Clanagan. The district was crowded, messy, and under-supplied, but this was not due to deliberate, malicious marginalisation so much as opportunity costs. The Bureau had said they wanted to get their newest guests a proper home as soon as possible, and given all that he had seen and helped them do, he was inclined to believe them. It was just that when you were trying to juggle an interdimensional war effort, two million (and counting) Federation-space asylum-seekers whose wellbeing was an explicit condition of co-operation from that universe's representatives, and a motley handful of dispossessed time-travellers who couldn't time-travel and espers who couldn't esp, it was fairly obvious which would be assigned the least priority.

Thanks largely to Itsuki's efforts, though, progress had been made. In fact, he'd been part of the inspection team Director Sheng had assembled to check out the housing developments on the eastern continent a few days before Chaos attacked the planet, and had found it entirely to his liking. When combined with the famous Bureau rehabilitation scheme to complement their few, horribly overworked therapists, he had felt he had reason to be confident about the exiles' future even were the restoration of their universe to take longer than expected.

Even the invasion of Mid-Childa had not knocked them back as far as might have been expected. When the portals started opening in the streets and daemons soared across the sky, the enclave's inhabitants had been faster to react than even the Bureau combat mages, swinging into action with grim resignation and lethal competence. It was as if they had been expecting something like that to happen – hardly surprising, when one considered what they'd been through. Battered yet functional weapons had seemingly appeared out of nowhere as espers rocketed skywards and time-travellers vanished into parallel planes, almost too quickly for even Itsuki, for all his training, to keep up. Though it was true that they had been amongst the worst-hit districts, as well as the last to receive aid, this was more a testament to the ferocity of their resistance than anything else.

No, it was not the invasion that had truly broken them. It was what came after.

The cleansing of their universe should have been a moment of joy, of triumph, and for a short time, it was. The survivors' lingering antagonism towards the Integrated Data Entity nearly vanished overnight, the god-computer's procrastination conveniently forgotten. Everyone had had a long, hard, journey, and more than anything, they just wanted to go home. Then, of course, they had heard the _rest_ of the story.

Haruhi's powers had not, strictly speaking, failed. Chaos was gone, and unlikely to come back any time soon. Unfortunately, the same applied to quite a lot of other things. Entire planets, systems, and even galaxies had vanished, hundreds of races lost to eternity. The Earth's population had been quartered, its inhabitants walking amongst and interacting with faded, incomplete shadows that had once been vibrant, living people and places. The scouts sent back spoke of towns like abandoned film sets, their buildings looking real and concrete until viewed from a certain angle as their citizens drifted aimlessly or looped their behaviour patterns over and over. Worst of all, though, was the fact that this new, stunted reality was all its people knew, save the odd, flickering dream of that strange, foreign country called the past. Even those friends and loved ones who came back might as well have been dead to the refugees for all the relation they bore to the men, women, and children they had known. Itsuki himself had tried to contact those few members of the Organisation he considered to be friends, and found nobody matching their description.

Suicides in the enclave had quintupled overnight. The Entity had refused to make any efforts to fix the mess it had created, stating through its Interfaces that all mission objectives had been reached, and that further tampering in an unstable environment such as the Suzumiyaverse in its current state would most likely prove counterproductive. After twelve particularly angry and stupid refugees had been disintegrated at the molecular level whilst attempting to assault a Humanoid Interface, the Bureau had been forced to step in.

Though things had calmed down a little since then, the ruined streets were still worryingly quiet as he picked his way through them. Solid-shot weaponry was not welcome on Mid-Childa, but he had developed the habit of carrying a small automatic pistol on his person anyway. Two attempted muggings in one day had been quite enough.

A multi-storey apartment building loomed up ahead, the words 'GOVERNMENT HOUSE' mockingly spray-painted across its cracked facade. The doors slid open jerkily as he walked in, and the receptionist gave him a forced, robotic smile. Itsuki knew from past experience that the expression was more genuine than it looked – Benjamin Peretz had never quite recovered from the nerve damage inflicted by a Siren of Mislaato's tender ministrations, which was one of the reasons he was stuck with an undemanding desk-job.

"Morning, Ben," the teenager greeted him, widening his own, more permanent smile in response. "What's that on the desk?"

The indicated object was a gigantic rifle (though 'cannon' might have been an equally accurate descriptor) that, lying on its side, managed to hide every part of the short receptionist below the chin. It was a sleek, almost organic-looking affair, made of a curious bluish metal that caught the light in strange and troubling ways.

"Oh, that? Belongs to the director's visitor. Left it here for security reasons. Speaking of, they wanted you for the meeting. Door's over there – you arrived just in time."

Itsuki shot him a quizzical glance, but the receptionist was already buried deep in his paperwork once more, his shock of spiky black hair bobbing in and out of view behind the massive gun. Eventually, he gave up, shrugged, and walked into the study.

Since the only desk or desk-like structure in the building that had survived the invasion was reserved for Peretz due to his health, the government-in-exile's leader had had to make do with strategically-applied cardboard boxes. These also served as chairs for guests, though one of the two visitors currently present was using the director's dilapidated armchair instead, in a display of typical Sheng chivalry.

One of the guests was quite obviously the owner of the gun, a big, heavily-scarred man in oddly insectoid armour of the same tinted metal. Itsuki could see that he wasn't an evacuee, though he couldn't have said why without reverting to the sort of rubbish about 'auras' and the like that he generally used to annoy his acquaintances. Suzumiyaverse refugees had one particular feel to them, and everyone else had another. It was as simple (and retroactively disturbing) as that, really.

The other guest, who was shifting her weight nervously to avoid being engulfed by the armchair, was Mikuru Asahina.

Itsuki had not seen much of the SOS Brigade's other remaining human since their escape, but then again, Asahina had a habit of fading into the background. Her natural lot in life, it appeared, was to be an aesthetically pleasing piece of furniture with all the assertiveness and effectiveness of a wet tea-towel. It would have been reasonable to assume that this was the role she had been trained for, but he'd been working alongside her for over a year, and _nobody_ was that good an actor. Frankly, he had half-expected her to stick with her to stick with her catering job on board the Eventide whilst her superiors employed a more competent agent, but he was prepared to be proven wrong. There had to have been _some_ reason she ended up babysitting a dormant god, after all.

This Asahina certainly seemed more alert and focused, though the overall impression of something small and fluffy about to get eaten had not entirely vanished. Whether this was to do with her or the chair, though, was open to interpretation.

Director Sheng rose from his own box and gave him a friendly nod as he entered. He was a balding, out-of-shape man on the wrong side of fifty, who had originally been a computer technician for a small esper faction operating out of Macau before their previous leader had been publicly flayed alive. Two months later, he had found himself in command of the entire Suzumiyaverse resistance movement on Earth, and it showed. He had a nervous tic in his left eyebrow, and an empty sleeve where his arm had been crudely amputated after it started to manifest the early symptoms of Warp-induced mutation. The rumours said that he had seen his entire family tortured to death in front of him, and that he had single-handedly killed the daemonic governor of Hong Kong and her legion of undying bodyguards with nothing but a fruit-knife. Itsuki believed both.

"Morning, Koizumi. Just the man I wanted to see. According to Major Ocampo here, our time-travelling buddies have decided to give us a little extra help with the whole Chaos business, and I figured that with your contacts in the Bureau, it'd be a good idea to have you listen in. Don't worry – they already gave you the go-ahead. Seems Miss Asahina here was quite impressed with your work."

Mikuru went bright pink and squeaked something unintelligible, but Itsuki was paying more attention to Major Ocampo – or, more specifically, the pair of very large knives attached to Major Ocampo's belt.

"Aren't your agents forbidden from carrying weapons?" he asked.

The major's grin lit up his otherwise brutish face in a decidedly pleasant manner. "Right. Who'd you think _enforces_ that? Sorry we couldn't help you out that much – or, at least, our other selves couldn't help you out that much. Whatever. Class Four reality-warps are damned confusing. See, our biggest problem, as I'm sure you've heard, is paradoxes. Fry your own grandmother or something, and odds are you'll futz up the space-time continuum something fierce. Bad news for everyone, and then some. That's why we're extra-careful about deploying our agents to observe rather than intervene, give them routine mind-wipes before we send 'em back, and try to exploit pre-existing time loops and Schrödinger events – helps avoid time-stream pollution, and reduces the odds of us accidentally erasing ourselves or something similarly daft. Suppose it was also the reason those invaders didn't get a few regiments of us dropped on their heads prior to the Class Four, though I don't know why the higher-ups bothered. From what Miss Asahina here said, things got really messy near the end."

"So there's a way around paradoxes?" Itsuki surmised.

"Sure thing. Why'd you think I'm here? The precise hows and whys of it elude me, but parallel universes don't have enough of a causal link for someone from the future of one to create a paradox by messing in the past of another. Both logistics and dimensional physics mean that we can only get to whatever the 'current' time is in another universe, which I'm afraid rules out popping over to Chaos's home universe a few decades ago for an assassination-job, but we can certainly bring some considerable firepower to bear in the here-and-now."

"Like what?" Sheng asked, eyes intent.

"Well, I can't say that our spacefleet'd match up to anything anyone else is bringing to the table – still haven't figured out proper energy shields, for a start, and interdimensional travel's _way_ out – but our ground-combat potential isn't to be sneezed at, and I'd rate our plasma technology above most of the weaponry on show except for the Bureau's magic and that Spiral voodoo. Which doesn't really count as technology, whatever their nutbag 'scientists' say, so go figure. Oh, and we might have a couple of other tricks up our sleeves as well. You esper-types were able to use your powers around those daemon-things, right?"

"To an extent, yes," the director agreed. "Our own specialists believe that they generate an aura of unreality, making the laws of physics more pliable in their presence. Normally, we can't do much in the real world when compared with the closed-space bubbles Suzumiya generated in our own universe, but with this 'Warp-energy' Chaos uses, I suspect we could boost our abilities even beyond that. Given the ghastly things it does to the minds and bodies of those exposed to it" – he indicated his missing arm – "I don't think we'll be exploring it too deeply, but it should certainly give us an edge against them."

"Right – same for us. According to the logs from our agents' TPDD devices, that same energy can actually _negate paradoxes_ for short jumps. Now, by 'short', I mean _really_ short – couple of seconds at best if you're facing down even a relatively big swarm – but you have to admit, being able to dodge an attack by ducking into a different time-plane is pretty damned useful." Ocampo's eyes flashed. "Until Miss Asahina briefed us, we had no idea that something like the world before could even exist... but that didn't stop us from seeing it. We saw it every time we closed our eyes – a bright, verdant land full of life and colour, far more real than the pale reflection we lived in – and I will regret that I was not there to see its fall until my dying day. These so-called gods turned our greatest asset against us, and used it to destroy and pervert everything we held dear. Frankly, I find the notion of returning the favour decidedly appealing."

Looking out at the ruined cityscape through the broken window, Itsuki could not say that he disagreed. There were some types of magic that even he did not believe should be allowed to exist, and some dark miracles that should never see the dawn.

His ever-present smile did not waver, but his hands glowed dimly as they clenched into fists at his side, whilst his eyes reflected the light of burning pages as exotic tales and fantastical illustrations crumbled into dust and ashes.

* * *

Evening had arrived, Mid-Childa's dozen moons standing out like pinpoints against the darkening sky. Itsuki walked through the smashed-in doorway of his small apartment, and let his smile vanish for the first time that day, massaging his aching cheek muscles as he did so. Now that he was alone, it served no purpose.

The desktop computer lit up as he approached, its rudimentary AI registering his presence. The device had been a gift from Bureau Intelligence – mostly electronic to aid use by non-mages, but fitted with a wide selection of technosorcerous gizmos like the AI to make his life easier, as well as, presumably, more bugs than an Osaka hostel if they followed remotely similar protocols to the Organisation. Someone had tried to steal it during the post-invasion looting, and the best that could be said was that they had found most of her. Eventually.

He sat down in front of it, and started typing up a report on time-traveller capabilities addressed to Mid-Childan Naval Command... whilst simultaneously employing a pad of paper next to the computer to write a far more _detailed_ report on the exact same thing, this time addressed to Director Sheng. Old habits died hard.

Major Ocampo had left halfway through the morning, citing pressing appointments elsewhere, and had asked them to direct any further questions to Mikuru. Apparently, she had had several of her mental-restriction locks removed, whatever that meant – the only answer he'd got when he asked was a simultaneous, monotone 'that's classified' from both of them. Whatever the case, she had proven helpful and informative, if still terminally shy and disinclined to talk to anyone except Itsuki. Again, he didn't know why this was, but supposed that it was something to do with their shared experience on the Suzumiya detail... unless the fact that her other interrogator was one of the few survivors of Ho Chi Minh City, mutated into a nine-foot-tall skeletal monstrosity with far too many eyes, had something to do with it. The government-in-exile were doing an excellent job with what they had, but they really needed to work on their people skills.

There was the faint rustle of a book closing behind him, and he spun round, automatic pistol already in his hand.

Yuki Nagato was sitting on the settee, the elderly, battered Hans Christian Andersen anthology in her hand. He slowly lowered the gun, the reddish stains that had been the sole remains of those twelve refugees appearing in his mind's eye with horrible clarity, and adopted the relaxed, friendly smile that implied that he had mysterious, hideously powerful aliens appear in his sitting room and rifle through his bookshelves all the time. _Letting one of them see me lose my composure – stupidstupidSTUPID..._

"Good evening, Miss Nagato. How may I help you?"

Her voice was as flat and devoid of inflection as ever. "At 15:39 Mid-Childan time, the Data Integration Thought Entity released all known data on the unit who brought about its home universe's readjustment. In addition, it has removed all support and privileges granted to me as a Type Seven Humanoid Interface."

There were many adjectives that could be used to describe Itsuki Koizumi, but 'slow' was not one of them. _Oh._

"So why are you here?" he asked, playing for time as his brain struggled to keep up.

Nagato blinked slowly, the closest thing to surprise he had ever seen from her. "Curious. That data is... unavailable to me. If it presents an inconvenience, I will depart."

Silence fell, and Itsuki's mind raced. He had not known what he would do when confronted with the creature that destroyed their universe. Would he attack it like those poor, foolish civilians had? Would he scream at it, demanding an explanation for its actions? Would he simply ignore it, treating it with the same dispassionate disdain with which it had snuffed out trillions of living beings? He did not have the slightest idea.

And all this time, it had been Yuki Nagato. Nagato, who had protected the SOS Brigade more times than he cared to remember. Nagato, who had gone against her own creator to save tens of thousands of people she never knew. Nagato, whose people had cast her out to cover their own political backsides. What if the rewrite had... not been so dispassionate? What if she hadn't known what would go wrong? What if she had seen it as the only option available? He didn't have an answer – he had not been there, after all.

"Look, will you stop _staring_ at me like that?" he snapped.

Her gaze dipped downwards. "I apologise. This is an inconvenience. I will leave-"

"Wait."

The word had come out on instinct, before he had time to muster the thoughts behind it. What he said next was rather more considered... but not by much.

"That settee folds out into a bed. You do use beds, right?"

Those depthless grey eyes were boring into him again, and he squirmed beneath their scrutiny. "Why?"

There were a hundred different answers he could give, but in the end, he chose the honest one. "You're Brigade."

"The social unit designated as the 'SOS Brigade' is little more than a fiction intended to allow the representatives of various organisations to safely supervise the activities of Haruhi Suzumiya. It holds no inherent value."

"Used to be. Not any more. You know why." He was still smiling, but for the first time in weeks, it actually felt genuine. "Don't worry – you'll find him. And when you do, I don't think the people who took him are going to know what hit them."

It was a while before Nagato replied, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible. "I... believe that to be a task appropriate to the entirety of the SOS Brigade."

There was no mistaking it – the smile was _definitely_ genuine. "I'll hold you to that. Coffee?"

Magic had betrayed him. It had destroyed his world, and turned everything he knew and cared about into a shallow, warped parody of itself. Nevertheless, there were some smaller, more mundane aspects of it that he still believed in. The magic that had turned an anarchic, disparate collection of oddballs into something resembling a family. The magic that let him feel safe in the middle of the apocalypse itself, all because one unpowered and thoroughly ordinary person was at his side. The magic that let him keep fighting when all around him was dead and gone, when all the forces of a distant, nightmare universe were arrayed against him. He did not know whether it was love, respect, or even simple faith, but he knew its cause, and he intended to bring him back.

It was as simple as that.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** HELLO, BOYS, I'M BAAA-ACK!

Ahem. 'Scuse me. Anyway, you lucky people have an extra two chapters to chew on, with more coming soonish. Can't promise a regular schedule again yet, but suffice it to say that the story has not been forgotten.

I'm inclined to agree with Itsuki that Freudian psychology is mostly a crock, but it's fun and easy to write about, and no crossover featuring Neon Genesis Evangelion in a major capacity would be complete without it. So it goes, eh?

Whatever the case, it's certainly true that of the dozens upon dozens of named characters in this beastie, the ones who are sane, stable, and well-adjusted could be counted on the fingers of both hands... at best. Do I intend to rectify this imbalance any time soon? Hell, no.


	35. In Loco Parentis

**34. In Loco Parentis**

The lights were dimmed in Hayate's quarters, allowing the huge holographic projector that dominated the room to display itself to best effect. The date in the bottom right corner was July 0077 by the Mid-Childan calendar, nearly two years ago, and the screen showed the cavernous main chamber of the TSAB Parliament, still with the squeaky-clean newness of recent refurbishment. It had once been not one room, but eight – floor upon floor of office-space for no less than three major and minor departments of the Bureau Army. When the civilian government had moved in after the military's loss of power in the Scaglietti Incident, though, it was decided that they needed a nice big space to contain their august deliberations (and, some less charitable commentators noted, certain members' egos), and so the office cubicles had had to go.

The result was undeniably impressive, with fifteen-metre-tall windows at either end painting narrow bars of light over row after row of blue leather seats. The walls were lined with rare woods from a hundred worlds, and adorned with paintings and inspirational mottoes from artists across TSAB space. Viewing galleries halfway up allowed the general public to see the proceedings below from behind ward-reinforced glass, assuming they were not fortunate enough to be given seats in the chamber itself. It was a testament to the glory of Mid-Childa and the might of the Time-Space Administration Bureau.

It was also the building's greatest weakness.

Any structural engineer could have told you that taking a big chunk out of the middle of a building would do that building's stability and integrity no favours, and during the creation of the chambers, quite a few had. They had been proven correct in the worst way possible when the Chaos demolition charges had detonated in the first stages of the invasion, effectively snapping the slender Government Tower in two at the waist and crushing thousands in the process... including over three-quarters of the parliament, plunging an entire interdimensional civilisation into mayhem.

It had taken weeks for the bureaucracy to catch up – Hayate was supposed to be preparing the First Expeditionary for the counterattack, but bits and pieces still kept popping up that should have been resolved long before. In fact, she had only just finished formally contacting the next-of-kin of her deceased troops, which had been about as enjoyable as one might expect.

There had been a few bad ones, not least Corporal Movano's parents, who had threatened and screamed at her until Signum was forced to eject them, but she still ranked the talk with Fate and Nanoha as the least pleasant. It wasn't that she'd known Erio and Caro longer than most of the casualties – the _Eventide_'s voyage had been long enough for her to become personally acquainted with quite a few of the fallen, and that was discounting old friends like Sergeant Ibrahim. It wasn't the patent absurdity of a formal meeting with people she saw every day, or even the age of the casualties, though those were undeniably contributing factors. Rather, it was the way her two friends had reacted that had nearly broken her heart. They had been so very _kind_ to her, asking how she was keeping up with the sort of solicitous concern that implied _she_ was the one suffering the most from it all. That was another one she'd had to end early.

Six years before, she had participated in an investigation of a terrorist attack upon a school in the Clanagan suburbs. They had employed a crude, home-made bomb built around a small magical reactor, intended to collapse the building on its occupants' heads and fill the surrounding area with sorcerously-boosted shrapnel. She did not remember what the terrorists had stood for – something about denying rights to artificial humans, or perhaps the sort of anti-military paranoia that would turn out to simultaneously be horribly prophetic and sadly misdirected a couple of years later. Certainly, nothing worth massacring children over. There was one thing about the mess that she did recall very clearly, though. She had been standing in the rain, Vita forming a shield over her to act as a makeshift umbrella, as the recovery teams dug one small body after another out of the rubble. She had made a promise to herself that day not to allow anything like that to happen again, to fight tooth and nail to avoid seeing another young life snuffed out. _Another one I couldn't keep._

On the screen, she saw herself take to the floor. The speech had been something of a necessity, an explanation of the military's goals and ideals after the true extent of its abuse of power had been unearthed during the battle against Scaglietti. Both politicians and the general public wished to be reassured that the frighteningly powerful armed forces of the TSAB existed to serve rather than dominate, and Hayate, as a rising star in the army and the person responsible for much of the unearthing, was the perfect fit for the job. _Good grief, I look so young..._

"Two years ago, we discovered a conspiracy within the TSAB's highest levels," her projected self began. "The Bureau Council and its accomplices in High Command had funded sadistic human experimentation, arranged the murder of Bureau personnel, attempted to obtain illegal Ancient Belkan artefact weaponry, and unleashed the greatest terrorist threat against Mid-Childa and the multiverse at large in recent history. Ever since, the military's influence and purpose has come into question from all angles, and for good reason. Our fleet numbers in the thousands, and our personnel in the tens of millions. Even one of our smallest vessels could obliterate a small nation in a single shot, whilst I alone could bring this entire tower crashing down around us in seconds. We can read minds, teleport thousands of kilometres in the blink of an eye, and process the entire information output of this planet ten times over. What can contain us? How can we be prevented from overstepping our bounds?"

The camera panned over the viewing galleries as perturbed muttering rose from the members' seats. Everyone was there – Fate, Nanoha, Yuuno, Arf, the Wolkenritter, Sister Carim from the Belkan Saint Church, and even Admiral Chrono Harlaown and his family. Amy, his wife, was looking as radiant (and pregnant) as ever, and was watching the proceedings with an interest befitting her former role as an Intelligence operative. The children, unfortunately, seemed rather less enraptured, and the twins were in fact pulling faces at the camera until their father shot them a meaningful look. Back in the real world, Chrono was currently headed to Federation-space to check up on the stabilisation project in that universe, before deploying to the Great Wall in order to supervise the increasingly frequent skirmishes and scouting missions against Chaos forces near the Bloodhaven entrance.

It was no secret that the daemon-world would be the target of the counterattack. With the Suzumiyaverse denied to Chaos, it guarded the only remaining passage through the Wall. If it were captured, the enemy would be bottled in, allowing Operation Guardian to forge on to their home universe with impunity. Hayate had mixed feelings about going back, though. On the one hand, any course of action that resulted in even the slightest chance of retrieving Vita was pretty much mandatory. On the other, every piece of data and first-hand knowledge she had told her that fighting in an environment as heavily tainted by Chaos as Bloodhaven would not be fun in the slightest. The former trumped the latter, of course, but didn't make her any less apprehensive.

The younger Hayate was continuing her speech. "The answer is simple, honourable Members. It is justice. It is discipline. It is the extraordinary power we possess, allowing us to take the hard path, to preserve, protect, and redeem rather than merely destroy. Why execute when we can reform? Why kill when we can incapacitate? Why butcher when we can negotiate? Might does not make right – might _demands_ right. This is why my purpose, and that of the new generation of combat mages, is to instil an unshakable code of courage, honour, and compassion in our recruits. That is why all are offered a chance at redemption, no matter what their crimes. That is why, people of Mid-Childa, we are your humble servants."

The apartment door opened, and she paused the recording, cutting off the rising applause from the speakers. Signum walked in, holding a steaming bowl that emanated a decidedly appetising smell.

"Reliving the past, Mistress Hayate?"

The colonel managed a smile. "Don't think I'm the only one. What happened to those logs from your training sessions with Private Mondial?"

The Wolkenritter stiffened. "Those serve a purpose. This does not."

"It helps me... remember. That's purpose enough. What's in the bowl?"

"_Kartoffelsuppe_. It is comprised of potatoes, sausages, and miscellaneous vegetables. You have not eaten yet, and it is my duty as a bodyguard to ensure your continued health."

Hayate accepted the bowl gratefully, careful not to let any of the contents spill, and fished around in the drawers next to the table for a spoon. "Thanks, Signum. Who'd you get to make it? One of the Catering staff?"

The tall woman averted her eyes diffidently, and held out a small metal tablespoon she had summoned from thin air. "It is of my own design. I have found it a valuable source of nutrients when Shamal was unavailable to provide us with sustenance."

"Wait – this was your fallback from _Shamal's_ cooking?" Hayate asked, staring at the creamy liquid with newfound horror.

"The Knight of the Lake is our designated cook. She has insisted on this. Repeatedly."

"Oh? Some day, I'm really going to have to ask why she intimidates you three so much."

Signum twitched. "I must respectfully request that you do not, Mistress Hayate."

"Fine, fine..." Gingerly, she brought a spoonful of soup to her lips. "My word. This is... actually pretty good. Very good, in fact. Could use a little more salt, but... Signum, have you ever considered practicing more? Diversifying a little?"

"That is not my allocated role. I am the Knight of the Sword, first warrior of the Wolkenritter. I would be better served in focusing my attention on better ensuring your protection, especially pending the Knight of the Iron Hammer's retrieval." Something almost like a twinkle entered her eye. "Furthermore, my current mistress is more than capable of attending to our culinary needs... when she is not occupied with reviewing outdated footage of her past pontifications."

Hayate had to smile at that. "I see. Well, far be it from me to tell you how to do your job. It's just nice to know that between you, Shamal, and Admiral Lindy, I've got at least _one_ mother-figure who knows her way around an oven. Could you at least give me the recipe?"

Signum nodded, and began to retreat from the room. "As you wish, Mistress Hayate."

"Thanks again, Signum. Sorry for making you worry."

"That is also my allocated role." The door closed.

She returned to the soup, gulping it down with a ravenousness that made her realise exactly how hungry she had been before. It really was delicious – especially after she retrieved the salt-shaker from the kitchenette cabinet.

Once she had cleaned up and placed the bowl in the miniature dishwasher, she returned to the recording, to her younger self's assertions of the might of the Bureau and the right of everyone to a second chance. They were the principles she had built her career on, the truths she held above all others.

She just wished it wasn't becoming so hard to remember _why_.

* * *

Signum strolled towards the hangars, re-checking the information on the _Eventide_'s ongoing refit for front-line combat. She made a mental note to ask for the return of the Kantian battlespoon when she had the chance – going to war without every one of her weapons at her disposal always made her vaguely uneasy.

"... Mother?"

It was said experimentally, as if testing out how the word sounded. She allowed one of her occasional smiles to creep across her face for a moment, before shaking her head.

Time to get back to work.

* * *

The smell of decay was a strange one, with a thousand different layers and textures that her dulled senses could nevertheless differentiate perfectly. Some were sweet and almost pleasant, whilst others were near-unbearably foul, but the rich, musty undertones were like a caress to the nose. It was curious, she thought, that humans tended to consider it such a deeply unpleasant concept. It was nature's means of cleansing itself, turning death into new life as the nutrients that comprised a corpse fertilised the soil around it. Ripe fruit, she had been told, were supposed to be the tastiest, whilst cheese was best when matured.

By any reasonable standard, she was _extremely_ ripe. Her body was a mass of infections, tumours, and other diseases, cells dying and regenerating almost every nanosecond. Most of her nerve endings were gone, the few that remained sending out sporadic bursts of pain as if to show willing. Her cataracted eyes cloaked the world in misty white, and the fluids from her cracked and broken skin coated the floor of her lair.

On further consideration, the human attitude was perhaps not so curious. The juxtaposition between her current state and her original purpose, though, certainly was.

Though protecting humanity and bringing about the next stage of its development had always been a large part of why she was created, it had not been her sole directive until later. She had seen the pictures in her father's private quarters of a woman who looked curiously similar to her. She had heard him moan Her name when he touched her, and she had experienced the sudden, violent rages he hid from all others, when he ranted at her for not being that unknowable, perfect Her he wanted so desperately.

Of course, it hadn't lasted. His professionalism, his drive, would not allow it. She had been relegated to paramilitary and scientific matters more and more, whilst he found another woman to rekindle his memories of Her, however faintly. This seemed perfectly reasonable to her. She had failed him in one function, so it was her duty as his instrument to do her best in another. Admittedly, doing her best in this capacity would result in a higher risk of death or injury, but that was irrelevant. She could be replaced.

Then her brother had arrived from outside the city, and everything had changed.

At first, she had been terrified of him – a rather unpleasantly surprising experience, considering how unused she was to fear. Power had swirled around him like a cloak, carrying with it the distant, skin-crawling promise of mayhem. Everything he came into contact with changed, intricate schemes falling apart and people who had known him for weeks at best pledging undying loyalty. Then it had been her turn.

There was a verse she had discovered some time later, during the assimilation of data she used to pass the time after her ascension. 'So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.' That was what he had advised – to celebrate her time, however brief, on this world, and do things because she _wanted_ to, rather than because they were her purpose. It had taken her some time to wrap her head around the concept, but once she did, she embraced it with gusto, dancing through the refuse of the slowly dying world around her with a smile on her face. For the first time in her life, she was experiencing freedom, and she rather liked it.

There were, naturally, caveats. It was only reasonable that she repay her brother for opening her eyes, which unfortunately involved even more chance of injury. In fact, two of them had been fatal, including a particularly nasty one in which one of her bodies had been turned into an ambulatory bioweapon factory. Nevertheless, she had failed to understand what was going on until it was too late, until she had already taken it into her head to take both the repayment and the unfettered hedonism to their logical endpoint, and become one with her brother in the same way she had with their father.

One more messy and painful demise later, she had a rather better understanding of her new purpose... specifically, that she still _had_ one. Living life to the full and doing what she wished were all well and good, but only insofar as they served her new master's goals. She was still someone's instrument – the conditions of her use were simply somewhat different. It was almost liberating, in a way. She was back to a model she understood, rather than flailing around in the dark.

Indeed, adhering to this purpose proved extremely fruitful. It took a while for the deaths to stop, and ascending was not exactly an immediately pleasant experience, but being invested with the power of an ancient deity was something few could complain about... particularly if they had as relaxed an attitude to their bodily integrity as she did. Better still, her brother had begun to invite her to his bed of his own volition.

Then the pattern of her life reasserted itself once more.

Her brother became increasingly distant as the years passed, spending more time around his other two chosen consorts, and she had seen the expression on his face when he laid eyes on her true form. He had tried to explain that it was simply because the essence she had been imbued with was the antithesis of his, but she knew the truth. As with his father before him, her imperfections meant that she was simply incapable of meeting his needs in that manner, and as with his father before him, she chose to further assist him in other areas in order to compensate. It was simply a matter of efficiency.

From then onwards, she had been responsible for most of the routine, miscellaneous work not directly related to the others' grand project. She had helped rebuild the world's shattered infrastructure, feed its starving populace, and, when she had the free time, capture and torture the various incarnations of her father and his associates across the multiverse.

Despite her brother's best efforts, she bore the man who had created her little in the way of ill-will. Working for his son was still greatly preferable, but at least he had had the decency not to disguise her purpose behind a veil of misguided philosophy and empty compliments – a trait she had found to be rare and much-appreciated. It was just that the sessions presented an opportunity to learn a number of interesting facts about the tolerances of the human body, and the others appeared to enjoy the recordings of them immensely. That was enough reason for her.

If it hadn't been for the voice, in fact, her life might have been entirely uneventful.

It began speaking to her shortly after her ascension – deep, friendly, and jovial, with the same phlegmatic undertone as her own voice. She had not mentioned it to her brother, of course. He probably had enough doubts about her value as an instrument without her adding more of her own accord. Despite that, it had not suggested inadvisable courses of action or the like, as she had been told mysterious voices in one's head were wont to do, but rather asked for information about her life, such as there was. She had been hesitant to provide it at first, but after her increasing isolation began to take hold, such qualms had largely vanished. Betrayal or no, it was... _nice_ to have someone take some measure of interest in her. Nevertheless, she did wonder why an entity apparently operating from within the confines of her cranium needed to hear about her from her own mouth.

_It's a simple matter of context,_ the voice had replied. _I may know the factual details of your past, but I don't have a very good idea of what you thought about them and how you reacted to them. I'm afraid I haven't interacted much with humans on a personal level before, you see._

"So how do you wish me to answer your questions?"

A rumbling chuckle. _Why, truthfully, of course. It's always worthwhile to have a little more truth around, don't you think? It can be so hard to find, sometimes._

On that point, she had to agree.

So it was that she relayed a bare-bones summary to the voice, pausing to fill in details wherever it asked for some clarification. There were some points where it seemed to get rather angry, much as her brother had, though the reaction was rather more puzzling in this case, less a case of frustration at an instrument being misapplied, and more... well, she wasn't quite sure what. When she asked, the voice just got very quiet and asked her to continue the story, dismissing the matter as irrelevant when she tried to apologise for upsetting it.

Eventually, she decided to ask after it in turn. "What is your purpose?"

_To preserve my own existence, and spread my influence in the universe,_ it replied simply. _Also, to find out what the human dish called 'haggis' tastes like. I am informed that it is one of the multiverse's greatest mysteries._

"I see." With half a dozen questions answered at once, she decided to leave it at that – and order either a haggis or something closely resembling it from wherever the Divine Kitchens had walked off to that week.

Despite learning all that she deemed relevant, the voice's interest in her remained undimmed. It asked enthusiastically after the latest modifications to her mind and body, and when she noticed how pleased it was when she reported some of them to be beneficial, she decided to describe them all that way... even the genuinely uncomfortable and unpleasant ones. It was not as if her own comfort had much value, after all. Fortunately, it had not caught on to her lies – in many ways, it seemed even more clueless about humanity than she was.

If there was one purpose it had beyond what it had already stated, then that appeared to be making her life easier. It would make wry comments to her as life passed them by, reeling off barely-comprehensible anecdotes and unflattering commentary on her associates that nearly made her swallow her tongue to keep from laughing out loud on more than one occasion. She might still have been a pariah, but at least she wasn't a lonely one any more.

That made the voice's sudden moment of seriousness one day all the stranger.

_I don't want you to die,_ it had said quietly, after she had stopped giggling at a remark regarding the (negligible) military and sartorial value of one of the other consorts' latest attempt at an armoured corset.

"That is an untruth," she replied. "My removal would be the most efficient means of facilitating the spread of influence you state to be your purpose, as you are quite aware that I am an imperfect instrument. Furthermore, the circumstances of my death are entirely outside my remit. I have already mentioned how much I dislike attempts to disguise one's motives with false sympathy, particularly of such a transparent variety. Please do not do it again."

It honoured her request, and though things were somewhat chilly between them for a while afterwards, they eventually returned to normal. When it apologised several days later, though, she had a feeling that it was not exclusively for the conversational gaffe.

She could never understand it – as an instrument, she existed to be used. Kindness was a means of control, a loan requiring repayment. Why bother hiding it? Why pretend to be concerned for her wellbeing beyond whether she was capable of fulfilling her masters' requests? There was no need to sugar-coat it – she knew perfectly well what her purpose was, and if nobody had yet shown any real hesitation in exploiting it, it would be illogical to assume that anyone else would. Not that she blamed them, of course – to respect an instrument that had repeatedly failed to match its masters' needs was equally illogical.

That was the reason why now, when the voice made a long-anticipated request of her in a tone that clearly expected – indeed, hoped for – a refusal, she replied with four simple words.

"That is acceptable, Grandfather."

It was the last thing Rei Ayanami ever said.

* * *

The being who had replaced the young goddess opened his eyes, sat down in the dank, wretched lair, and waited. Patience had always been his watchword, and the complexities of the current situation demanded that he exercise caution and restraint, and only make his move at the most opportune time. Going off on a murderous rampage (and wasn't it funny how he thought of it as 'murder' now?) fuelled by rage, grief, and crushing self-loathing would accomplish precisely nothing.

Even so, it was very, very tempting.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Two down, two to go. This, my friends, is what happens when you attempt to fix someone's extensive psychological problems by inducting them into a religion that basically feeds on emotional imbalance. As with the _TTGL_/_Bokurano_ business, it seldom ends well.

Given that the person responsible for most of the culinary disasters in the Nanoha-verse is the (mostly) non-combatant medic, whilst the best cook is also capable of nuclear-level devastation and even the White Devil herself is the thoroughly competent heir to a bakery, it is only logical that Signum should have some moderate talent for food preparation. See? I think about these things.

By the way, well-made _kartoffelsuppe_ is indeed rather tasty. I advise giving it a go.

Join me once more when the next update appears, in which we encounter space battles, galactic politics, and ruminations on the flexibility of dress-codes in public buildings!


	36. State of the Nation

**35. State of the Nation**

The midday sun beat down upon the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, heating the pale, dusty pavement to the point where it could burn the soles off unprotected feet, and causing the gleaming flanks of the cluster of buildings that served as the centre of government for the galaxy-spanning United Federation of Planets to shine with painful intensity. Most particularly, though, it beat down upon the sweltering head of Chrono Harlaown, who was starting to seriously wonder whether his custom-tailored black uniform was entirely appropriate attire for this sort of mission.

The Bureau's youngest admiral was Navy through-and-through, quite literally born and raised on starships to the point where being exposed to natural light actually made him slightly uncomfortable. Being exposed to natural light after grabbing three hours' sleep on the way to a major political encounter halfway through a demented round-trip of the local multiverse was even worse... and the fact Amy was due any day now didn't help, either.

It wasn't that they'd never heard of contraception – it was just that as Fleet Admiral Thundra would have put it, there was no final, permanent defence against sufficiently sustained bombardment. His adopted sister, Fate, had once remarked lightly that they were subconsciously trying to replicate the uniquely crowded hubbub of a Bureau warship that they'd both grown up with... which he took as her typically gentle revenge for the psychology textbook that had been one of his less well-thought-out birthday presents to her. It wasn't as if he could tease her about her _own_ childhood, after all.

Whatever the case, Chrono was just as tired, irritable, and nervous as he had been the first five times... with the salient difference that he hadn't been trying to get a quarter-galaxy back in working order then. He just hoped, for the sake of his continued sanity, that this operation would go more smoothly than he expected it to.

"I've read the reports," he began, his Device's encryption field forming a gentle haze around them that transformed their conversation into innocuous gibberish from any outsider's perspective. "I've spoken to a few dozen players in this little melee. I even visited the ruins of the New Syracuse base, and _that_ was far from a pleasant experience, let me tell you. Now, there's one little thing I want you to do for me."

"And what would that be, admiral?" Brigadier Edsyl Pinter asked, smiling ingratiatingly.

"Tell me this scheme of yours again, _in a way that makes sense_."

They entered the (blessedly cool) entrance lobby of the Federation Council Building, a small, low-ceilinged room whose designers had gone to considerable effort to make it appear much grander and more spacious than it actually was. On that note, they had succeeded, though the towering, stork-like Bureau Intelligence brigadier's presence did undermine the effect somewhat. Admiral Harlaown was far from a short man, but even he had to look up some distance to talk with Pinter eye-to-eye – a necessity made even more irritating by the lanky analyst's constant nervous, excited twitching. It was a habit he had never seen Pinter without, as if he had some great epiphany he wished to impart to the world at the earliest possible convenience (which, for better or worse, he usually did), and here, at a galactic power's very seat of influence, he positively vibrated.

Captain Picard and a handful of his officers were at the front of the procession, nodding graciously to the building's security personnel. Behind them were Chrono, Pinter, and six young men and women in the standard brown TSAB uniforms, most of them wearing some form of prominent, if understated, jewellery. The admiral's flagship, the _Claudia_, was waiting in dimensional space just outside where the Earth's atmosphere ended in realspace, and its technicians had repeatedly assured him that barring some astronomical unlikelihood, their transporters would be able to extract the entire party, Starfleet officers included, in seconds if something went wrong.

Chrono had needed the reassurance. If the transporters didn't work, the six people in brown would be required, as per Naval Command's orders, to activate their 'jewellery' and... well... he just hoped the Bureau would be able to foot the bill for the Federation's new Council Building once the dust settled. After the abortive diplomatic expedition to the Romulan Star Empire, Fleet Admiral Thundra had deemed all operations in this universe 'no risks', a peculiar idiom of his that meant everything from 'know when to fold 'em' to 'they can't shoot back if they're sleeping off a bombardment spell to the face'... or, more often, both at the same time. Sagitar Thundra was not a man known for the subtle approach.

Of course, Chrono had taken the bombardment squad to one side before deploying planetside, explaining to them that (a) the only acceptable reason for them to go active was if a sizable portion of the continent's population started attacking them, and (b) being only an A-rank mage with a hand-me-down Device had not stopped him from personally eliminating multiple rogue citykillers in the past. Waving the aforementioned Device under their noses had proven suitably illustrative, as well. Sometimes, he felt less like someone's commanding officer, and more like the slave whispering in a triumphant Earthborn warlord's ear that 'remember, Caesar, thou art mortal'.

Even so, he wasn't sure he had needed to bother. Pinter's groundwork had apparently paid off, and the advance team had already entered without a hitch. None of the guards were looking particularly antagonistic, and some were even saluting. Perhaps the creeps in Intelligence (from which, as always, he mentally excluded his wife) had a point – everyone really did have their own little levers.

Not that that made _listening_ to how much of a point they had any more enjoyable.

"Well, let me put it this way," Pinter began, stroking his long nose self-importantly. "First off, the background. You're familiar with what they call the 'Year of Chaos' over here, yes?"

"Very," Chrono replied drily, biting back his immediate urge to grumble at length on the subject.

"Right, then let's skip to how things are at present. The big dogs in this quadrant of the galaxy are, of course, the United Federation of Planets, though they're not nearly as healthy as they used to be. For a start, there's two of them now, and the folks we're about to meet only represent one. The other is the Aldebaran Self-Preservatory Alliance, a major secessionist movement that's the reason I'm surprised nobody's decided to shoot our boy Picard on sight yet."

"The anti-Prime Directive lot, right?"

"That's the one. Normally, the UFP's pretty relaxed about secession – they've got _brochures_ for it, for crying out loud – but the Directive's quite another thing. An entire interstellar alliance dedicated to breaching it due to external pressure from a single vessel's worth of preachy, murderous slavers? Yeah, they didn't take it well. Only reason both sides aren't busy presenting each other with structurally-superfluous new orifices is because everyone else jumped on them almost immediately."

"Like the Romulans?"

"_Precisely_ like the Romulans. They're a civilisation that puts great merit on subterfuge and self-preservation, and were smart enough to stay the hell away when the _Stiletto_ went off on its demented little crusade. As a result, they actually ended up profiting from the Year of Chaos – with most of their political rivals severely weakened, they're ascendant like never before. In fact, the only reason they didn't buddy up with our deific friends is that the _Stiletto_'s captain did the same thing to their ambassadors that they tried to do to Admiral Lindy. In fact, odds are the latter incident was inspired by the former." A sidelong smile. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all."

Chrono was unamused. "Next time, I'd prefer that that flattery does not involve attempting to remove my mother's head and return it to us in a gift-wrapped box. No matter how glittery the wrapping-paper is."

The smile did not go away. "Fair enough. Not like they're going to try for a repeat performance after what she did to them, anyway."

This point, the combat mage had to concede. Lindy Harlaown was kind, gentle, and a generally wonderful parent, and he had nothing but the utmost love and respect for her. As such, it was easy to forget that she was also an S-rank mage with over thirty years of military experience... unless, for instance, one happened to try to decapitate her. According to their more architecturally-minded informants, the partial demolition of the Romulan Hall of State had not done much to enhance its classical beauty. The wrapping-paper tarpaulin had been a nicely Christo-esque touch, though.

"Funnily enough," Pinter continued, "the Star Empire isn't actually the most immediate threat to the quadrant. There are a couple of factions with a particular interest in the Damocles Nebula, the area around New Syracuse, but it was the Cardassian Union who got hit worst when Chaos began their initial attacks. They're a charming bunch – a fascist military dictatorship with a list of atrocities as long as my arm, and nationalist as all get-out. Well, you know what happens when a nation like that gets its backside handed to it militarily? _They freak the hell out_. The entire Union's gone rabid, lashing out blindly in some sort of hare-brained scheme to restore their national pride in the face of crippling defeat. At least the Romulans and Borg are halfway predictable. Well, _were_ predictable, in the Borg's case."

"The Borg? I know they played a big part in the Year of Chaos, but I never got a good idea of who or what they were. Everyone just seems to refer to them as this great big bogeyman."

"That's because that's pretty much what they were. They were a cyborg collective obsessed with upgrading themselves by assimilating other species, whether those other species wanted it or not, and until the _Stiletto_ came along, they were pretty close to being unstoppable." Pinter's lip curled. "By this universe's standards, anyway. Anyway, long story short, they got on Chaos's bad side for some reason – wish we knew why, but after the way the Federation cleared out the New Syracuse remnant, I doubt we'll ever have the opportunity to ask – and they spent the last month or so of the Year driving the Borg out of the quadrant. Now, I know the Bureau's attitudes on genocide, but by the enemy's limited standards, this was practically a public service. Apart from anything else, their hive-mind structure means the Borg aren't big on individuality, so I'm not quite sure 'genocide' properly counts here. It's more like the _Stiletto_ was shooing away a single, gigantic entity."

"Charitable of them. So what was the bad news? I'm presuming there was bad news."

The brigadier smiled as if a small child had just shown uncharacteristic wisdom. "Naturally. As I mentioned, it was _practically_ a public service, but the other effects of the Year of Chaos served to minimise the good done, whilst maximising the bad. Ghastly as they were, the Borg actually served as something of a stabilising influence for the Alpha Quadrant. They provided a common adversary for the various nations to band together against, whilst also serving to curtail expansionary ambitions, particularly the Cardassians', lest they attract unwelcome attention. Not that that warranted their continued residence in anything remotely approaching normal circumstances, but once the post-_Stiletto_ land-grabs started and didn't stop... yeah."

Pinter trailed off as they reached the far end of the lobby. Two full squads of guards were at the door, along with a short, huge-eared Ferengi whose epaulettes denoted him as an officer. This last one walked over to Picard, giving him a guarded nod.

"Captain. Your advance team is in the Council Chamber. You know the route. First, though, I have a question – and no bullshit, please. Is this going to be a repeat of last time?"

"In what sense, lieutenant?" the captain asked.

"The noise your new allies have been making _sounds_ good" – and here the lieutenant threw a disdainful glance towards the TSAB officers – "but I swore an oath to preserve not only the Federation Council, but the Federation itself. Your last speech in this building was a trigger for our civilisation to tear itself apart, and I will _not_ let that happen again."

The six bombardment mages shifted position subtly, before hurriedly straightening again as Chrono's telepathic reprimand jumped into their minds. Oblivious to the minor drama behind him, Picard simply smiled a weary smile.

"Believe me, lieutenant, I intend quite the opposite."

The Ferengi's hand moved away from the phaser on his belt. "I certainly hope so, captain. You have my permission to enter, but remember – we'll be watching."

"I would expect nothing else. Feel free to correct us if we stray from procedure a little – I want this to be as by-the-book and official as possible. Let this be a reminder not of the Federation's weaknesses, but of what makes it great."

A needle-toothed grin. "Finally, a stance I can get behind. Don't disappoint me, Picard."

As they walked out through the doors, Chrono felt the eyes of everyone in the room upon them. It was a sensation he was not unused to as an admiral and representative of the Bureau, but he'd never much enjoyed it, either. They could almost feel the explosive tension draining away as they followed Picard deeper into the maze that was the Council Building, and once they were out of sight of the guards, Pinter let out a long, low whistle.

"Thought you said you had it all planned out," Chrono remarked drily.

The brigadier blinked at him. "Pfft. 'Course I do. Never a moment of doubt in my mind. It's all a matter of levers – have I mentioned that? Now, where was I?"

"Spending far too long on the back-story when I asked for an explanation. So we've got backstabbers, fascists, and assimilation-freaks. Is there any other nation in this mess of a universe who might be even remotely co-operative?"

"Fortunately, yes. The Klingon Empire's another heavily-militarised bunch, like the Romulans and Cardassians, but they've calmed down quite a bit since they started co-operating with the Federation a century ago. They're big on honour, loyalty, and pretty much all the other stuff you'd expect from that sort of civilisation, and we have reason to suspect that they'd be even more enthusiastic about getting their own back on Chaos than even the UFP. In fact, if it wasn't for the lack of dimensional travel, they'd be at it right now, overwhelming military disadvantage be damned. As is, though, they haven't been doing much except battening down the hatches whilst the rest of the galaxy goes nuts. The current political debate there is whether to side with the Federation remnant or the Aldebaran Alliance. The Alliance's more proactive stance would usually win it a lot of support, but the Klingons have been sort-of-allies with the UFP for quite a while, and they're not all that sold on any organisation with 'Self-Preservatory' in the title, if you catch my drift."

"Drift caught, and background processed. You still haven't explained what you intend to _do_ about all this."

"All in good time, admiral." The brigadier's face was the very image of schoolteacherish indulgence. "Now, can you tell me what the common thread here is?"

"It's a hopelessly convoluted fiasco?"

"Pre-_cisely_! This universe has far too many problems to fix in decades, let alone weeks or months. Our job here is to get them to a point where they're stable enough to both assist us against Chaos and start working on their own problems, rather than tearing each other to pieces. A more involved reconstruction can wait until the war's over. With that in mind, the problem becomes quite simple – we need to see what caused the loss of stability, and fix that. Cause – the loss of influence by the quadrant's resident peaceful superpower, the Federation. Solution – strengthen the Federation."

"Tidy. So what do you suggest to accomplish this?"

"That," Pinter's smile broadened, "is even simpler. For a start, we have a shining proof-of-concept in the New Republic."

Chrono's stomach lurched. "Pinter, _please_ tell me you're not talking about the Spiral Drivers..."

"And why not? According to our scientists' projections, a single upgraded cruiser should be nearly a match for a Chaos warship, and when you consider how much trouble they had with the _Stiletto_... well, the scenario writes itself. Even better, their replicator technology shouldn't work on the Drivers, and we know from experience that they're an utter nightmare to reverse-engineer, so unlike the Republic, where we just handed over the blueprints – no idea what the folks in charge of _that_ were thinking, _complete_ disregard for tech-pollution – we can actually _control the supply_ here. It's win-win."

"It is indeed... assuming that you ignore the odds on a Driver array consuming its crew, wiping out half your fleet, or, hey, I don't know, _obliterating the universe_? Seriously, Pinter, what the _hell_ are you thinking?" He had begun to raise his voice, attracting odd looks from the front of the procession.

Pinter leaned in close until their heads were level, glancing around nervously. _Hey, hey, hey, ix-nay on the Anti-way Iral-spay. I kind of... haven't told them the small print. Figured it'd make the deal go smoother. Necessities of diplomacy – you know how it is, right? Right?_

Chrono winced, fighting back his rising headache and switching to telepathy just as the colonel had. _Right. Fine. I see. So how exactly is not telling our putative allies in a major interdimensional conflict all the details about the deal we're offering a 'diplomatic necessity', hmm? I mean, it's not as if they already have a very good reason to distrust extradimensional visitors with an agenda, right? _Are you completely out of your mind_?_

_Look, it's not as bad as you make it out to be. First off, there's no Force, and the dimensional space is clear here, so there's much less chance of a malfunction than in the Republic. Second off, I highly doubt that the Federation's going to get inebriated enough with power to bring about the Spiral Nemesis. If anything, most of their tendencies where hypertech has been concerned are in the opposite direction – that's why Chaos took objection to them in the first place, after all. Most likely, we'll just see a few captains going murderously insane, and on a galactic scale, that's peanuts. When you're operating at this level, you've got to have a few sacrifices, right?_

_Huh – funny. Thought we'd left that attitude behind with the old government, especially where our allies are concerned. Silly me. That's irrelevant, though. Do you have any idea of how many ways this will go wrong, or do I need to list them for you?_

_I'd prefer you didn't, thanks,_ Pinter replied coolly. _This is my job, Harlaown. I have served as an analyst in no less than eight dimensional disputes, including the Varduk Prime crisis, and I think my record speaks for itself. I have studied the dynamics of all the players involved in this scenario, formulated eighteen different paths that would prove beneficial to the Bureau, and spent the past two weeks ensuring that the best of those unfolds precisely according to my design. I memorised the personalities and likely actions of the entire Federation Council in a matter of hours, and even figured out which media network would be most suitable for our purposes. To put it bluntly, me Intelligence, you Navy. Savvy? Now, sit back, relax, and Let. Me. Work._

_... Fine. We'll do things your way, and I won't even bother bringing up that WMD detonation on Varduk twelve days after negotiations ended. Just one thing in return – I know it's difficult for you Intelligence-types to keep track of all the data that passes through your mighty intellects, but me admiral, you brigadier. Do try to keep it in mind._

_Of course... sir._ Pinter's expression was all smiles as he raised his voice, presumably for the benefit of the Starfleet officers. "By the way, sir, I hope you don't mind that I borrowed the Infinite Library representative you brought along. We needed someone in the advance team with knowledge of interdimensional culture, and I figured she'd be perfect for the task."

The utter horror on Chrono's face made his reaction to the news about the Spiral Drivers seem like mere perturbation. "Wait... when you say 'she', you're not talking about _Arf_, are you?"

"Well, yes. Is that a problem, sir?"

"A problem? _Is that a problem_?" The admiral shook his head, grinning disbelievingly, as the neglected encryption field flickered and died. "Pinter, you asked me before why I'd refused your request to transfer to a command role in one of the front-line branches. Well, here's your answer. It's stuff like this. You go on and on about your unblemished record, about how you've studied and calculated every eventuality, about how you're such a _wonderful_ judge of character, and I'll bet that line of bullshit gets you top marks in Intelligence, but once you actually put it into action, what's the first thing you do? _You put Arf in a roomful of politicians_."

He turned to the remainder of the procession, still wearing the same manic, rictus grin. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to run now. Run and pray. I advise that you do the same."

For some commanders, the time they spent with their families was their means of escape from the stresses of the workplace. For Chrono Harlaown, dealing with a small army of hyperactive children was _practice_.

* * *

The Council of the United Federation of Planets was not a particularly large body, when one considered the amount of territory it represented and the vast power it wielded, and the Council Chamber was a remarkably unimposing affair if holograms, neon lights, and lots of brushed-steel weren't your thing. It was a long rectangle, with the president's podium at one end, the viewing gallery for the media and general public at the other, and two blocks of eighty seats, one on either side. In addition to the president, his staff, a huddle of extremely nervous reporters, and the Bureau advance team, there were over a hundred and fifty councillors present, each representing planets, systems, and suzerainties whose populace often numbered in the high billions. At the moment, every one of them was watching the untidy figure in the middle of the floor with the same morbidly fascinated bewilderment usually reserved for large animals walking into stately homes and defecating on the carpet.

Arf, meanwhile, was enjoying herself immensely.

"Miss... umm... Arf," one of the councillors began, attempting to take a firm and reasonable tone and failing miserably, "I must point out that whilst Article 367/J _does_ indeed apply to an emergency situation such as this, it only allows Federation citizens the right to speak on the Council floor. Not to put too fine a point on it... you're not."

The wolf-type familiar closed her eyes and smiled, her tail swishing confidently. "Oh, but I'm not the speaker. This is just the warm-up act. Article 584/Q, section VIII. 'Speakers in the Federation Council are granted a staff of no more than thirty persons, some of whom may be from outside the Federation in accordance with section XIX'."

"Yes, but that requires the appropriate documentation to be filled out," another councillor added hopefully. "Rather a _lot_ of documentation."

"You mean this?" Arf asked, an enormous sheaf of paper appearing in her hand with a theatrical flash of light. "One of the advantages to being on the Infinite Library's payroll is that you tend to end up being _really_ good with paperwork. Filled it out on the way here, and got it authorised by the folks on Floor 5. Centralised government really does have its advantages, doesn't it? By the way, I liked question 6 on the immigration form. Do you often have people 'planning the utter collapse of humanity and the subjection of the Federation's citizens to tentacular horribleness'? Wait, don't answer that."

"Fourth Guarantee, Federation Constitution," a snout-nosed Tellarite snapped. "Freedom of the press shall be obstructed by neither the government, nor by any private body. Explain yourself."

"This lot?" The familiar's ears twitched, and she glanced at the decidedly cowed journalists assembling equipment under the advance team's supervision. "Oh, they're here of their own free will. Happy as clams. Right, guys?"

The grin she flashed displayed her elongated canines in a manner most worrisome, drawing a succession of hasty nods from its recipients.

"Article 627/S," a councillor caught on the periphery of the grin's effects suggested weakly. "Improper... dress?"

"Wait, you mean _this_?" Arf indicated her minimalist halterneck-and-hotpants ensemble, causing several of the older humanoids in the room to develop a pressing interest in the walls and ceiling. "You're kidding me, right? I mean, have you _seen_ what the Orion councillor's not wearing?"

"That's traditional!" the green-skinned woman at the back objected, almost causing a wardrobe malfunction as she shot to her feet.

"Right? So's this. Or do you think it's easy to find clothing that accommodates a tail?"

"ENOUGH!" the Tellarite roared. "This farce has gone on for far too long. Screw the formalities – _where are the guards_?"

Arf's grin broadened, losing any small vestiges of friendliness it might have once possessed. "Ah, yes. I knew someone would get round to that eventually, and I was hoping that it would be you, Councillor Skadath. See, the fact that you've got an immigration office so close to your legislature is only one of the reasons I like the way you do things here. The other is that unlike most governments – including, regrettably, our own – you don't just hire dedicated muscle-boys to guard that legislature. Instead, you use Starfleet Security. Also known, thanks to the fuzzy distinction between civilian and military you've got going, as _the police_. So how do you keep the police off your backside, councillor? Simple. You toe the line, you stick within the very letter of the law, and if that's not enough, you present 'em with a more tempting target. It was interesting, really, what we found in your cellar. No, perhaps I should say _who_ we found. Some of them were _three years old_, councillor, and while I'm not entirely _au fait _with the age of consent on Tellar, I think that's a little way outside it."

Her gaze swept round the chamber, causing seasoned politicians to wilt as it passed over them. "Again, I have to compliment you. This is one of the cleanest public bodies I've seen, especially for one with such influence. That said, it's amazing what you can dig up with the tools available to the TSAB. Were the perks you got from the Cardassian Intelligence Bureau worth it, Councillor Dubois? How about you, Councillor Vessek? Starting to wish you'd hired someone less talkative to take care of your wife? Councillor Willard, meanwhile, fascinates me. Siphoning funds from disadvantaged communities to the point where it induces absolute poverty should be impossible in a primarily post-scarcity economy, and yet you somehow managed it. I must say, that takes a special kind of genius."

Some of the more alert councillors were already inching towards the exits, but stopped when Arf wagged a chastising finger at them. "Ah-ah-ah. _Baaad_ idea. Head through those doors, and you'll be getting half a dozen phasers to the face. Relax, it's just a precautionary measure, so they're set to stun, but I've heard that getting hit by one of those is pretty unpleasant anyway. Besides, as the enlightened Councillor Skadath pointed out in that speech of his last month, the innocent have nothing to fear from the law."

This did not appear to present the chamber's non-Bureau inhabitants with much in the way of consolation. In fact, the rest of the advance team were starting to look less-than-cheerful themselves.

"So here's how it's going to be," she continued. "We have the firepower, the positioning, and the preparation time. That means that we talk, and you listen. Any further questions?"

It was at this point, of course, that Chrono and Picard's group entered the room, pale and out-of-breath. The Starfleet captain looked around, meeting the silent glares of one hundred and fifty-two councillors.

"... How bad?" he wheezed.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, dear readers, I apologise for the delay, but on the plus side, I have _five_ shiny new chapters up for your delectation. Yes, you read that right.

Incidentally, I make it a policy to reply to my reviews, so I must apologise to KD that his/her/its rather extensive one won't be getting a direct answer. There are two reasons for this – first, that it was submitted anonymously, ruling out a PM reply, and second, that said reply would be far too long and spoiler-filled to be suitable for general author's notes. Again, sorry. Glad you've enjoyed it so far, though, KD, and hope you continue to do so.

I will take this opportunity to shoot down one angle of speculation, though – whilst other fictional universes may well be getting cameos and minor roles here and there, all the settings that are major players in this story have already been introduced. We're currently winding up to the final third of the Doorstop, and things are going to get crazy enough without depositing, say, the _Lensman_ universe or the Culture in the middle of things.

This also means that the as-yet-unmentioned universes that Chaos affected in _The Open Door _will not be getting much coverage, mostly because I couldn't figure out how to smoothly integrate them into the narrative. Just assume that, for instance, things settled down for the _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ crew eventually after their little daemonic-possession/attack-by-rabid-fusion-fic incident, and they went back to business as usual with a few extra mental issues and the odd case of split personality. Which _is_ business as usual for them, come to think of it.

Finally, on a more chapter-relevant note, I am quite aware that Arf was de-aged into a child-like form during _StrikerS_ in order to conserve Fate's magic, and there are indeed reasons for this being reversed. Not all of them are necessarily _good_ reasons, mind, but that's Arf for you.


	37. Sales Pitch

**36. Sales Pitch**

Much as with Admiral Harlaown's experiences with armed guards, Jean-Luc Picard had often had politicians look at him with barely-disguised hostility. In fact, this was not even the first time it had happened in the Federation Council Chamber. Given the disaster that his last speech had ended up being there, though, getting the exact same reaction before he had even opened his mouth was not a good thing.

In the end, it was the Orion councillor who spoke first.

"She _insulted_ my _dress-sense_," she stated petulantly.

It took considerable effort on Picard's part to keep a straight face. "Then I apologise on her behalf, Councillor Ayla, and compliment you on your adherence to the values of the Orion people." _It only makes sense that the oldest profession should have a few traditions of its own, after all._

The Betazoid telepath in the front row started sniggering, and Councillor Ayla shot him a filthy look.

At the head of the chamber, President Min Zife rubbed the cartilaginous ridge bisecting his face with a blue-skinned hand, as if staving off a headache. "Picard. I should have known. Was triggering a civil war in our darkest hour not enough for you? Must you tear the very heart from our Federation? Whatever your newest allies paid you was ill-spent – rest assured that the Council _will_ not submit to the demands of a cowardly traitor such as yourself."

"Arf," Admiral Harlaown enquired mildly, "did you by any chance suggest to these good people that we were engaging in a coup against them?"

"Well, you see, Brig Pinter was going on and on and I sort of lost the thread halfway through and had to figure things out by context and I'm pretty sure that I got the general gist and... wait, we're _not_ organising a coup here? _Why do we never get to organise a coup_?"

Picard raised a hand. "For the record, I'd like to mention to the Council that I had no part in this."

"Me neither," Chrono growled. "I apologise, honourable councillors, but it appears that my... _subordinates_" – he shot a meaningful look at Pinter and Arf – "got a little bit carried away. Since I'm prepared to chalk up at least some of it to Arf being... herself, that means you get yelled at _second_, brigadier. This way, specialist..."

"Wait... what are you... owowOWOWOW..." Dragged along by her ear, the familiar kept up her string of complaints almost all the way to the exit... until she saw the look in her commander's eye.

Beside Picard, Brigadier Pinter gave an audible whimper. The chamber was silent for a moment, before the distant sounds of an extremely annoyed naval officer at maximum volume began to filter through the walls.

"So what _did_ you intend here, Picard?" Zife asked, with the exact same tone of strained patience that Admiral Harlaown had used scant minutes before.

"To talk. That's all. To exercise my rights as a Federation citizen under Article 367/J. Is that acceptable, Mr. President?"

"That depends. Which of our government's founding principles do you wish us to compromise this time? I'd prefer that it wasn't universal equality – I've got a rather nice office, and it'd take a while to move all my things out of it."

Picard smiled. "None of them, actually."

"Oh? Then I _am_ interested, even if it is the morbid fascination of an impending shipwreck. Go ahead, captain."

"Understood, Mr. President." He turned to the viewing gallery. "Sergeant, is the equipment ready?"

Half-buried in a tangled mass of 'liberated' journalistic paraphernalia, a Bureau technician gave him an awkward combination between a salute and a thumbs-up. "Full multimedia, sir. Going international in 3... 2... 1..."

The massive holoprojectors the advance team had deployed lit up, showing the interiors of the Aldebaran Alliance's General Assembly and the Klingon High Council. Most of the politicians on-screen looked almost as bewildered as the Federation councillors.

"Zife, what in the Emperor's name is going on?" the Klingon chancellor, Gowron, snarled.

"I know about as much as you do, chancellor," the president replied, seeming unnaturally cheerful at this fact. "Ask him."

"Well, it's perfectly simple, Chancellor Gowron," Picard replied smoothly. "I wish to present an offer on behalf of an interdimensional civilisation opposed to Chaos. Not just to the United Federation of Planets, but to the Aldebaran Self-Preservatory Alliance and the Klingon Empire."

He paused for dramatic effect – or, more accurately, to get his own thoughts in order. He was quite aware that the Bureau were using him for their own ends, whatever those might be, and while Admiral Harlaown's intervention had certainly helped restore his faith in their good intentions, it had not done the same for his faith in their competence. Even the fact that he could see no other alternative was not hugely encouraging – he had felt exactly the same way when he came up with the genius idea of attempting to convince the Federation to abandon the Prime Directive. All in all, he just hoped that history would either vindicate him this time, or be sufficiently occupied with the wider effects of the ensuing catastrophe to forget about the person who helped start it all. _Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead..._

"Let me ask you a question, my friends. Why did I suggest the repeal of the Prime Directive? Why did the Aldebaran Alliance go along with it, even to the point of separating from the Federation, without the slightest concern for those they forcibly uplifted? Why did the Federation itself declare war in the face of annihilation, stressing unity above all else? Why does the mighty Klingon Empire wait dormant, rather than imposing its will upon the galaxy at large? Not ideology, my friends. Not the oath-sworn principles of our offices and cultures. Only fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of annihilation. Fear of the enigmatic, terrible beings who swept us aside like ants to sate their own self-righteous, murderous caprice. We creep in their shadow, some paralysed, some lashing out, some trying desperately to appease these new gods. All have but one goal in mind; to ensure that their tormentors – _our_ tormentors – do not return and finish what they started."

"Objection!" Supreme Commander Menelaus of the Alliance shouted. "President Zife, I demand that these... these _insults_ be stricken from the record!"

"For once, I agree with the Aldebaranian puffball," Gowron rumbled. "_Nobody_ may accuse the Klingon Empire of cowardice."

By now, Min Zife wore the dementedly cheerful smile of a man tap-dancing through a minefield. "As astonishing as a junior lawyer such as yourself might find it, Menelaus, this is not a court-room. If it was, I suspect that this whole farrago would be concluded far more swiftly. Carry on, Picard."

"Thank you, Mr. President." Picard gestured, and another projection appeared next to him, showing a pair of ships approaching each other in deep space. "This is a recording of an engagement two weeks ago. I'm sure you recognise the combatants – one is a Borg cube, one of their few warships remaining in the quadrant, and the other is a _Sovereign_-class battlecruiser. Specifically, my own _Enterprise-E_. The latter has been upgraded with a hybrid technology developed by the Time-Space Administration Bureau, the extradimensional allies I spoke of – a technology they call the 'Spiral Driver'."

The illusory vessels had already engaged, the colossal cube dwarfing its opponent. It almost seemed to be toying with the _Enterprise_, flicking out cutting beams and shield neutralisers with the closest thing to bored contempt a three-kilometre-tall biomechanical battleship could muster. The Federation cruiser, though, did not seem to be having any of it, blocking every attack with a barrier of solid green fire.

Then, it began its counterattack. Every phaser bank fired at once, covering the space between the two in a web of flickering, verdant beams. The cube's shields collapsed in seconds, fragments the size of city blocks melting and crumbling away from its hull. In desperation, its own barrage intensified, disruptors and torpedo launchers across its surface focusing on the interloper that dared wound it so. The _Enterprise_ weathered antimatter explosions that could demolish cities, blasts designed to shake it apart on a molecular level, and beams capable of slicing through a planet's crust, with little effect other than the brightening and expanding of its barrier.

"When an appropriately-fitted vessel's Spiral Driver banks are activated, its weapons and shielding are strengthened exponentially," Picard explained. "You will note that the _Enterprise_ achieved these results using phasers exclusively – no torpedoes or more advanced weaponry were involved. In addition, the vessel begins to manifest several more unusual abilities – particularly once the enemy start shooting at it."

As he said it, the cruiser's barrier flared enormously, causing its target to stop shooting for a moment as its sensors overloaded. A second later, it collapsed, reforming into an enormous phantom drill which struck the side of the cube like the heavens' wrath. There was a single, frozen instant where nothing happened, and then over twenty-seven cubic kilometres of heavily-armoured battleship shattered like glass.

Ignoring the gasps from around the room, Picard continued his spiel. "Apart from the energy-absorption, Spiral Drivers also allow interdimensional travel, as well as temporary alteration of the ship's hull, usually in order to add further, exotic weaponry to its arsenal. Ah yes, and since you haven't yet seen what they do to quantum torpedoes..."

Within the drifting wreckage of the cube, something moved. A battered, armour-plated sphere shot out, moving away from the _Enterprise_ with unsettling speed for something so large. Its hull crackled with energy as its abused warp drives prepared for a jump – though the Borg had no real concept of fear, whoever or whatever was commanding it clearly felt that discretion was the better part of valour.

In response, the Federation cruiser fired a single torpedo. The audience saw a greenish streak as the missile crossed the distance, and then the star-field behind the sphere _twisted_ and its dull grey surface rippled like jelly. The screen went white.

As the video feed returned, they saw that the sphere had vanished. So had half of the demolished cube. All that remained was a faint afterimage of a spiral overlaid on the display.

Picard studied the reactions of the various heads of state. Gowron was staring at the projection with naked avarice, Zife was giggling quietly to himself and appeared to be on the verge of tears, and Menelaus looked like he would much prefer to be back in his own home, hiding under the sheets and hyperventilating. Astonishingly, it seemed that Brigadier Pinter had actually managed to get two out of three predictions correct.

"This," he continued, "is what the Bureau wishes to give all three of our nations. A power to challenge gods. A road to the multiverse in all its glory. A total paradigm shift in how we perceive the universe, and in how we interact with it. In return, they ask only one thing."

"The destruction of Chaos," Chancellor Gowron stated with unholy relish.

"Their censure and containment, at least," Picard amended, ignoring the frantic hand gestures from Pinter. He realised the clarification would do nothing to help sell their offer, but in his experience, it was best to nip the legendary Klingon bloodlust in the bud before it got out of hand and the war crimes started to stack up. Besides, there had been more than enough half-truths and misdirections in this little affair to make him appreciate a spot of honesty.

Gowron merely raised an eyebrow in the inimitable manner of his species. "If those are the terms you wish to use, then yes."

It was not a reassuring reply, but he decided to press on anyway. "My friends, we have lived in the shadow of the _Stiletto_ long enough. With the assistance of the Bureau, we need no longer fear the agents of Chaos. We need never let them taint another universe with their influence again. No more running. No more hiding. No more compromises. Today can be the day that we reclaim our place in the multiverse. Today can be the day that we cast aside the infighting and animosity that have bedevilled us in our darkest hour, and show our foes that the Alpha Quadrant cannot be bullied, cannot be oppressed, and cannot be discounted. Citizens of the Federation, sons and daughters of Kahliss, signatories of the Alliance, today can be the day that we DRIVE THEM BACK!"

He was shouting now, swept up by a cheap, gaudy tide of patriotic fervour and righteous fury that he knew to be entirely fabricated, and he did not care in the slightest. People were cheering, their voices seeming to come from miles away, and a small, detached part of his mind dimly noted that some of them had been patiently waiting for him to either leave the chamber or spontaneously combust not long before. The Betazoid councillor was looking deeply worried, Councillor Skadath was frantically whispering into his communicator, and Councillor Ayla's outfit had done what it had been threatening to do all afternoon, and nobody seemed to have noticed.

Grinning for reasons he didn't fully understand, he turned to Gowron's image. "Chancellor, my old security chief once told me one of the myths of your people. He told me that you destroyed your gods, sounding their death-knell with the very first heartbeats of your ancestors. These ones may require a little more effort, but would antimatter warheads be an acceptable alternative?"

The chancellor replied with the closest thing to a genuine smile he had given since the broadcast had begun. "Contrary to popular belief, the Klingon Empire is not entirely opposed to the marvels of modern technology. Your offer shall be considered, Picard of the Federation."

"And you, supreme commander?"

Menelaus looked pale, determined, and very, very young. "I was part of one of the first expeditions to New Syracuse after the Year of Chaos ended, captain. Rest assured, the Alliance bears little affection for the _Stiletto_ or its masters. This new technology you speak of may be no more than smoke and mirrors, but if it isn't..."

"I assure you, sir, it isn't." Picard just hoped that the Aldebaran Alliance's leader would not ask him what the Spiral Drivers _were_ like – the greasy caress of the terrible, alien power they channelled was something he suspected would revisit him in his nightmares for quite a while to come, and the fact that the crew interfaces strongly resembled Borg technology didn't help, either. He was quite aware that he had more than a few unresolved issues where the assimilator collective was concerned, and being reminded of them every time he walked onto his own bridge was far from a welcome experience.

He made the appropriate formal farewells, signalled for the technicians to cut the feeds, and turned back to the presidential podium. The temporary elation was already wearing off, replaced by the chill sobriety that his younger self recalled from those times when he had woken up in an unfamiliar bed with an unfamiliar warm lump next to him and the general sensation that something had either died in his mouth or at the very least been extremely ill.

The Federation, of course, would be getting most of the Spiral Drivers. The pretext would be its greater size, but in reality, its greater stability would be far more important. A new balance of power would be created, maintained by the careful expansion of various nations' stockpiles of alien superweapons. The worst part was that it had sounded so very _reasonable_ when Brigadier Pinter initially suggested it – leaving out some of the more salient details tended to do that.

For a moment, he considered ditching the whole thing. It wouldn't even be all that hard – everyone who could do something about it would be right in the room with him. All he had to do was open his mouth and start talking, letting the truth flow out as was a Starfleet officer's first duty. That was it.

Then Pinter gave him a friendly little wave from across the chamber, and he saw the gleam of dark red metal in the lanky brigadier's hand. It would be easy... and at the same time, it would be entirely impossible.

The mage had not indulged in any of his usual fidgety mannerisms on the day he showed Picard the folder, and he had read its contents with a calm smile and a conversational tone. Everyone had their own little levers, the things that they valued more than their nation, their pride, and even themselves, and Pinter had found them, laid them out on the table, and politely asked what the captain wanted to happen to them.

Starfleet was well over two hundred years old, and an organisation of that age was bound to accumulate a few legends. One was the _Kobayashi Maru_, an Academy training simulation from the twenty-third century. It had been deliberately programmed to deny any chance of victory, in order to assess how cadets would deal with impossible decisions where the only winning move was not to play... and Picard was in far too deep for that to be an option any more.

Instead, he merely composed his face into a neutral expression, and looked up at Min Zife. "So, Mr. President. Your opinion?"

The old Bolian politician did not answer him immediately, instead pinning Brigadier Pinter with a level, searching gaze. "Your people, colonel. They do not place much stock in the Prime Directive, do they?"

"The Directive, as I remember it, states that nobody 'may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture'," Pinter replied, his smooth voice at odds with his impressive collection of nervous tics. "With all due respect, Mr. President, the Year of Chaos blew that out of the water. All we seek to do here is patch up the mess the _Stiletto_ left behind, whilst simultaneously allowing you the chance to regain what was lost and defend yourselves against those who might seek to take advantage of you. The multiverse has found you, ladies and gentlemen, and no amount of closing your eyes and covering your ears – or equivalent sensory receptors – will make it go away."

"Thank you for the elaboration," Zife commented drily. "You want to know what I think, Picard? I think that _you have exceeded yourself_. The speech on the Directive was nothing compared to this – a mere wave in an ocean, a mere tremble in the earth. Anything I say or do now is irrelevant. This is bigger than me, Picard. It is bigger than the Federation itself. All we may do is follow the stream, and let history be our judge... unless a presence closer to home decides to fill in for it first."

_He knows. He knows what Pinter's doing. Zife, I'm sorry I voted against you._ "Then may I cede the floor?"

"Certainly. I'm sure that my colleagues will wish to debate this at length." An ironic smile, half towards Pinter and half towards the Betazoid councillor. "If the good brigadier will permit it?"

The mage simply nodded and smiled. He'd won, and he knew it.

"Ah – one thing first, please," another voice said.

Admiral Harlaown walked onto the floor, a thoroughly subdued Arf trailing after him. "The specialist would like to make a public apology for her behaviour. If you would...?"

The familiar looked wretched, her ears drooping and her tail between her legs. "Umm... yeah. Sorry for, you know, the intimidation, the fashion critique, the stealing of the equipment... you get the picture. Sorry for all of it."

"Apology accepted, miss," Zife replied, his voice dripping with hollow magnanimity. "It's not as if you needed the extra leverage, anyway."

Councillor Skadath raised a hand. "Wait... does this mean that the whole business with the guards isn't happening? Bygones being bygones, and all that. Just so we're clear on this."

Despite being one of the few full-blooded humans in the room, the admiral's answering smile had _fangs_ in it. "Oh, no. That stands. The Bureau honours its deals, and besides... you aren't the only civilisation where military and law enforcement get tied together. I hope you have a good lawyer, councillor."

Silence reigned, and then Zife started chuckling, building up to full-blown, hysterical laughter. If it had not been for the last, tenuous shreds of his sense of decorum, Picard would have felt like joining in. Dozens of councillors leapt to their feet, howling in protest, as security personnel filed in to herd Skadath, Dubois, and their ilk away, and the journalists grabbed their pilfered equipment and surged forward, rattling off questions with the gusto of sharks around a haemophiliac.

Amidst the mayhem, the TSAB teams quietly packed up their things and left.

* * *

"I'm disappointed, Pinter," Harlaown began. "Very disappointed. Your mission here was to help get the Federation's universe up and running again, lay down the foundations for future Bureau-sponsored aid programs, and, as an optional extra, enlist them as allies in the battle against Chaos. Playing power games that end up making us look like a bunch of manipulative, disruptive imbeciles was _not_ on the agenda – or did you forget that you're working for the Time-Space Administrative Bureau rather than, say, the Belkan Empire?"

"I consider myself an intelligence officer, sir," Edsyl Pinter replied tightly. "That's all."

"Which justifies this... how? No, no, I don't need to hear the answer to that. It'd probably take hours on end and leave me twice as confused as when we started. My only regret's that I have to head off on another assignment before I get back in touch with Naval Command, but rest assured – when I do, I'm submitting a full report. Let's see what Fleet Admiral Thundra's opinion is on this, hmm?"

"As you wish, sir."

As he watched the boy make a beeline towards their pet Starfleet captain, Pinter couldn't help but fume. There were a lot of things he could have said a moment ago. He could have pointed out the military value of the Federation's antimatter and replicator technology. He could have explained that it was because of the very existence of Bureau Intelligence, a body willing to go to any length to ensure the vast organisation's survival and prosperity, that people like the good admiral had the freedom to lord their moral superiority over everyone else. He could have mentioned how Harlaown and his clueless minions had not helped matters much either, or how insufferably _difficult_ it was to read one of those freakish, inhuman familiars. He mentioned none of this, though, because there were several ways in which he was not prepared to waste his time, and one of them was attempting to reason with a bone-headed, wet-behind-the-ears Navy pup who was the recipient of some of the most spectacular nepotism in recent history.

Nevertheless, a problem remained. He had nearly completed the groundwork that would gradually, inevitably turn not only the Federation, but the entire Alpha Quadrant into dependents of the Bureau. A quarter-galaxy's worth of potential mages and exotic technology at their disposal for the protection of the multiverse, and his supervisor wanted to run off to daddy _right_ at the least opportune time. At least there were solutions to that sort of thing – particularly when said supervisor was about to head into enemy territory, a place where accidents were famous for happening. He just wished he wouldn't have to spend so much valuable capital in order to arrange it.

Idly, he brought up the feed on his Device's heads-up display from one of his monitor drones. Harlaown and Picard were talking quietly, and it was but the work of a moment to pierce the other mage's encryption field. The boy-mage was currently describing a secure channel to the captain that would allow the latter to contact him privately if he ever felt the need – standard procedure for people one considered to be under undue pressure. Clearly, someone had been paying attention to that damned telepath the Council had – he knew Harlaown hadn't done as little research on this universe as he'd claimed to. Pinter made a note to have it jammed, along with the admiral's other unmonitored lines.

Despite Harlaown's rank, that procedure would actually be fairly easy. All he had to do was have one of his associates wrap it up in some guff about an investigation of the boy's private life and drop it into the feeding tank that was Internal Affairs. Intimations of a financial motive would perhaps be best – the pay for senior officers in the Navy was not quite what it might have been, and when one factored in Harlaown's explosively-breeding family, the narrative essentially wrote itself. As the great Inspector Acous once put it, nobody, no matter their station, could evade the eyes of Bureau Intelligence... and whilst that wasn't a particularly _original_ way of putting it, he felt that the source gave it a merit of its own.

_Sorry, Harlaown. Nothing personal._ He paused, and recalled some of the insults the boy had heaped upon him._ All right, so maybe it is a little bit personal. Such is life, I guess._

He still had some time before he needed to execute the scenario, though, and there were other matters he needed to attend to in the meantime. He navigated through the HUD, selecting a private channel of his own use. It was labelled 'Obsidian', a name chosen in deference to the 'Obsidian Order'... the old title of the Cardassian Intelligence Bureau.

Sometimes, it astonished him just how _straightforward_ shaping the destiny of a galactic civilisation could be.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** As you may have noticed, the _Star Trek_ universe is probably the major setting I have the least intimate knowledge of in this story. Hope it doesn't show too badly.

Incidentally, I decided to down-grade phasers a little in this fic. According to Trek background, they're actually pretty devastating, with the larger ones nearly equivalent to one of Warhammer 40,000's lance turrets in destructive potential, and even the hand-held jobbies easily outmatching an Imperial Guard lasgun. With that in mind, I honestly couldn't see how the _Stiletto_ could have cruised so effortlessly through the Alpha Quadrant's defences (except for generous helpings of plot armour – not that I'm y'know, _implying_ anything), so a swing of the nerfbat was evidently in order.

That said, I point-blank refuse to do the same for photon torpedoes and their bigger brothers, quantums. Whereas phasers are powered by technobabble, and thus are as powerful as the plot deems them to be, the antimatter warheads on photon torpedoes are a known quantity to modern science – and an obscenely powerful one, at that. Quantum torpedoes, meanwhile, whilst still powered by technobabble, are defined as 'more powerful than antimatter warheads of equivalent size' – which, again, makes them something of a known quantity. As such, expect antimatter to play a big part on both sides, whether delivered by photon torpedo or otherwise. After all, Chaos has N2 mines, too...


	38. A Warm Welcome

**37. A Warm Welcome**

The area around the vast superdimensional barrier known as the Great Wall was called 'Wild Space' by the Time-Space Administration Bureau's navigators for a very good reason. The dimensional currents there were treacherous and unpredictable, capable of whipping up storms that could blind their most sophisticated sensors and crush ships-of-the-line like insects. Time flowed differently there, voyages taking seconds or weeks whilst hours passed in realspace. It was a den of pirates, smugglers, and far stranger and more horrifying things, a savage, uncivilised frontier set apart from the peace and order of Bureau-supervised space.

The forces of Chaos called it the Doldrums.

The _Conqueror_ cruised through dimensional space with terrible majesty, its Geller field not so much deflecting the folds and disturbances in the continuum as shunting straight through them. It was a Zeruel-class heavy cruiser, four kilometres long and of the standard design for Chaos's new, mass-produced warships. It resembled a curious hybrid between a cathedral tower and an ironclad of old, lined with hundreds of turrets and other weapons systems offering coverage in almost every direction. At one end was the heavily-armoured, beaklike prow, and at the other, the rearmost kilometre bulged outwards to contain the bridge, main engines, and a good portion of the support systems.

It would have been quite obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that this vessel was not intended for friendly purposes, but as ever, Chaos's shipwrights had gone the extra mile. The spikes studding the hull were adorned with human bones (clone-grown, as placeholders until the ship managed to acquire some of the genuine articles in combat), the most unsettling and eye-hurting runes of the gods had been engraved tens of metres high into the armour, and the turrets' muzzles were adorned with daemonic maws that growled and snapped mindlessly into the empty darkness of space. The disturbingly ornate frescoes covering the unspiked, unturreted parts of the hull, though, were entirely standard-issue – the only difference from those on a civilian vessel was that the acts depicted therein did not look quite as mutually-consensual. When your top naval architects spent most of their free time staring into the Warp and giggling, there were some things that you simply had to accept as inevitable.

Admiral Rong-Arya had a model of it as part of her collection. It was amazing how much detail they'd been able to fit in – with a microscope of appropriate magnification, you could even see the thing with the daemon, the banana, and the flock of very surprised sheep just underneath the Deck Seventeen disintegrator battery. Needless to say, she had never let Cassandra near it or any of her other models – it wasn't that she was worried about 'corrupting the child's mind' or something similarly idiotic, but rather that little girls and fragile, delicate objects did not mix.

As if on cue, her daughter looked up from where she was perched on the arm of the _Conqueror_'s command throne, pouting in boredom. "Are we there yet, Mama? You promised we'd be having a battle today. You _promised_."

Rong-Arya smiled at her, gently braiding her hair with her clawed hands. "One moment, honey, we're almost there. Mama just has to finalise the preparations. Commander, are the void shields up?"

"For the third time, yes," Commander Ichiro-Faust, her executive officer, growled. "Not only that, but the S2 engines are running clean and sweet, the fusion reactors are barely being taxed, and the Geller field's the stablest I've ever seen it... again, as I have mentioned _several_ times already. Look, ma'am, I know you're worried about it, but we're _not_ going to have a repeat of the business with the Cylons, all right?"

"Sorry, commander. You know how it is. Just let me know when we're in range, will you?"

"Of course, ma'am."

Rong-Arya and Ichiro-Faust were, if not the last of a dying breed yet, certainly the products of a very limited-edition run. Prior to (and even after) warp-based cloning and time-distortion becoming viable, manpower and resources had been at an absolute premium for the survivors of Third Impact. This had fostered a very particular philosophy in them – the limitless power of the Warp would not be used to produce more, so much as to make every unit they did produce as perfect as possible. Post-scarcity economics were not easy things to grasp. Their first dedicated warship, the _Stiletto_, was essentially a test-bed for every advanced technology they could muster – including more than a few that turned out to be mutually contradictory in their effects – and so it only made sense that the crew would have similar attention lavished upon them.

Every member of the crew was augmented, whether via cybernetics, mutation, or even stranger means, but the senior officers had received the lion's share. With the advent of ascended daemons, death was not the end – or, at least, it wasn't the end for anyone who had died before Third Impact. As such, the gods had an extraordinary amount of accumulated knowledge to draw upon... provided they could get the owners of that knowledge persistent realspace anchors so that they could share it with everyone else. It had been Mislaato who suggested the solution – possession. The new generation of officers would have their minds and bodies melded with those of ascended geniuses from across history, allowing the ultimate marriage of youthful vigour and ancient cunning.

At least, that was the plan. The reality, naturally, ended up being somewhat different.

The possession process was complex, time-consuming, and prone to spectacular failure, with the slightest accident or mistake resulting in a severe case of split personality at best, or irreplaceable personnel, whether human or ascended, having their minds irreparably damaged or even destroyed at worst. Nevertheless, as with the Divine Assassins and Space Marines, that would have been acceptable so long as the end results returned the investment. To cut a long story short, they didn't.

Astonishingly, the various conservative, cranky old men brought back to serve their species once more turned out not to have much to say about models of warfare and society involving sorcery, space combat, and physics-warping, building-sized cyborgs... assuming that they survived the culture shock at all. One of the ascended, a rather shy German scientist, had gone catatonic after looking at the inside of a super-solenoid engine, though given that he had not been heard from since, there was also the possibility that the discrepancy between his stated political views and the ideals that the gods championed might have had something to do with it. With all the ascensions going on, there was often something of a time-lag between someone being brought back and the powers-that-be actually reading their biography.

Rong-Arya, meanwhile, was one of the program's most successful products. Her components – a quiet young psyker who had received a new lease on life after being plucked by Chaos's recruiters from the bombed-out urban battlegrounds of Shanghai, and an elderly, charismatic warlord who had been rewarded by the gods with daemonhood for his collaboration during the post-Third Impact consolidation – got on very well with each other, allowing a mostly-flawless meld, and their shared knowledge and talents were, relatively speaking, quite relevant to humanity's current situation. Even so, she was far from infallible.

Arya Prayang had been an excellent general in life – forging a small, peaceful-ish empire out of the ruins of a subcontinent was more than enough evidence of that – but that did not necessarily translate well to combat on an interstellar scale. Furthermore, the technological might of the _Stiletto_ made it far too easy to get overconfident – after curb-stomping the first two galactic superpowers, delusions of invincibility were pretty much inevitable. It was for this reason that after a bad jump left them crippled and lost without shields, weapons, or even motive power, the first thing they ended up doing was picking a fight with a bunch of mechanised religious fanatics.

On paper, the Cylons should have been pushovers. Primitive electronic warfare suites, nothing even resembling shields, and weaponry consisting of bog-standard guns and missiles did not an intimidating foe make. Unfortunately, some of those missiles were tipped with rather large nuclear warheads, and so it was that Rong-Arya and the crew of the _Stiletto_ learned two important lessons. First, that if the future from which you are borrowing most of your technology has directed fusion weaponry as its gold standard in anti-armour work, the undirected, planet-depopulating variant is probably going to hurt. Second, and relatedly, that void shields are really, really important.

Eventually, the (even more primitive, and badly battered) refugees that the artificials had been chasing had had to bail the _Stiletto_ out, leaving a bitter taste in Rong-Arya's mouth that not even blasting the Cylon fleet into atoms once everything was back online had managed to remove. She had the powers of the Warp, an invincible warship, and two brilliant tactical minds at her disposal, and she had _still_ managed to screw up.

In the end, the death-knell of the officer possession scheme had been sounded a month after the _Stiletto_ began its maiden voyage, when a Prussian ascended with an affinity for fancy helmets and the supernatural ability to grow luxuriant moustaches regardless of whose body he was occupying managed to formulate a worryingly plausible plan for taking over the divinely-appointed government from the inside. Needless to say, the gods did not take kindly to this, and since it came so close behind the business with the scientist, placed a temporary moratorium on Germans getting ascended... until they found out about the French diplomat, the Italian banker, and the Turkish dictator who had also been involved. There were occasional rumours about restarting the project using mindless clones as daemonhosts, but it wasn't exactly a high-priority endeavour.

As a result, the possessed officers, like the _Stiletto_ itself, were something of a relic in Chaos's ever-advancing war machine. Whereas the latter was a museum piece and object of research these days, though, their gods still had work for the former – the illustrious Captain Rong-Arya, the only one of their ship commanders to see actual combat, in particular.

Initially, she had thought that she might face censure for her actions – most of the _Stiletto_'s 'explorations' had in fact consisted of cutting a swathe of fire and death across various unsuspecting interstellar civilisations of wildly disparate influence and morality, and whilst that had undoubtedly been satisfying, and had usually seemed like a good idea at the time, she didn't really see how it helped them bolster their defences against the C'tan. Instead, quite the opposite had happened. The gods had praised her for her efforts, promoted her to a rank befitting fleet command, and assigned her to deal with the border skirmishes cropping up around the Bloodhaven gate. Apparently, quite a few people were upset with them. She couldn't imagine why.

Most of the _Stiletto_'s crew had gone their separate ways after they returned home, either returning to civilian life to live off their fat pensions, or sticking with the military in the hope of getting a prestigious position elsewhere. The exception was Ichiro-Faust, her former tactical officer, who had even refused a promotion to keep working with her. It was a decision that had surprised and flattered her – the other daemonhost was a good officer, and it was always nice to have a familiar face around on the long, boring frontier patrols she expected to see so many of in the near-future. One relocation from tactical to executive later, and she had the perfect second-in-command to help her weather whatever awaited her outside the Great Wall.

Even if she didn't fully understand why the gods were so pleased with her, the reason her help was needed at the border was much more immediately apparent. The commanders there were still unused to the fact that they were up against enemies who could actually hurt them, and this new civilisation, the so-called 'Bureau', was exploiting it for all they were worth. They had even had several ships captured rather than destroyed, including one containing an entire company from the Space Marine chapter known as the Heralds of Tzintchi, and even the God of Ambition himself wasn't entirely sure that all of them had managed to activate their suicide protocols in time. Needless to say, that was when everyone started doing their best headless-chicken impersonations.

Once the most incompetent officers had been weeded out and dealt with in a manner deemed appropriately gruesome, Rong-Arya went to work at restoring the fleet's shattered confidence with her usual brisk efficiency. Patrol routes were tightened up and listening posts relocated, drawing on her own experience of dodging through the Alpha Quadrant to strike far behind enemy lines without warning. Combat logs were carefully assessed to formulate new tactics and new weapons to counter the enemy, flavoured with the new admiral's own knowledge of what worked and what didn't in space combat. Even if she couldn't promise invincibility, she could at least get them damned close.

It had worked. The fleet's survival rate steadily improved, as did their facility at scoring kills, gathering information, and even taking prisoners, who were treated to yet another facet of the lessons Rong-Arya learned in the Alpha Quadrant... often at length, and in front of their comrades. The skirmishes developed into a war of information, each side trying to obtain as much knowledge as possible about the enemy as possible whilst yielding as little as possible of their own, and whilst the forces of Chaos were still not gaining as much as the admiral might have liked, they weren't losing much any more, either. Even so, training and strategy could only take one so far. The true measure of a commander, she believed, was in how they reacted to the opportunities presented to them.

It was an anonymous, untraceable data-package which none of their agents claimed responsibility for, and which none of their interrogations had unearthed. That was immediately suspicious, but the information it contained managed to explain a lot of minor inconsistencies in the intel they had received thus far, whilst also being far too tempting to ignore. The TSAB forces would be receiving a new commander, and they knew where the changeover would be taking place.

Though this was obviously an excellent way to learn more of the enemy's secrets and throw their fleet into anarchy, Rong-Arya saw more in it than that. Capturing this new commander and anyone else of importance at the changeover would be an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate the might of Chaos against the best the weaklings of the Bureau had to offer. As such, she had elected to lead the assault personally, taking along one of the fleet's newest and most advanced ships-of the line, as well as escorts blessed by all four gods and crewed by the most elite devotees she could muster at short notice. In truth, she would have preferred to use her own flagship, the colossal battleship _New Syracuse_, but as magnificent as it undoubtedly was, it was a bit too big and slow for this sort of mission. _Blitzkrieg_ raids like this required a more subtle, delicate touch, and the _Conqueror_'s four kilometres of laser-spewing death would do nicely.

"Sensors are picking up energy readings matching Bureau warships ahead," Ichiro-Faust reported. "Fifteen signatures, and at least two of them are probably big enough to be their equivalent of ships-of-the-line. Looks like that intel was right on the money. Ready to start the party when you give the word, ma'am."

"Roger that, commander. Lieutenant Monza, signal the _Argus_. It's time to call the storms."

Their pet mage simply nodded, setting his facial tubes to jangling like nightmare wind-chimes as his sibilant voice echoed through her mind. _Aye, ma'am. Nice weather for it, isn't it?_

Of the captured Bureau personnel, Lieutenant Florio Monza was one of Rong-Arya's most successful projects – a loyal follower and a gold-mine of information who had taken to Chaos's prototypical blend of warp-sorcery and Mid-Childan magic like the proverbial duck to water. The fact that his brain appeared to operate at right-angles to reality was an irritant, but something of an inevitability given the admiral's preferred recruitment methods, and with the sheer number of sorcerers roped into the Bloodhaven project, she had to make do with what she had.

His eyes, mouth, and nose were gone, replaced by a series of ribbed, articulated metal tubes protruding from his face. They were connected to a bizarre, gently pulsating melange of organic and artificial components fused to his chest, its weight giving him a permanently hunched-over stance. One hand had been extensively mutated, forming a lobster-like claw that he clicked at the air at odd intervals, as if to a rhythm only he could hear. He still wore the tattered remains of his TSAB Navy uniform for some reason, the rank insignia of Chaos's armed forces crudely sewn onto the shoulders. All this meant that when compared to the rest of the _Conqueror_'s bridge crew, he averaged out as somewhere between 'presentable' and 'moderately handsome'.

The gods had never made a decree against fraternisation on their warships. Funnily enough, it had never been much of a problem.

Outside the bridge's viewports, the gentle undulations of the Doldrums' endless colours began to become more rapid and agitated, the dimensional sea expressing its disquiet as the thousands of psychic clones wired into their Arael-class support frigate, the _Argus_, did their work.

"The Geller field's starting to come under strain," one of the tech-priests reported. "Shall we divert power from the fusion reactors?"

"Negative, Engineering. This ship was built to handle far worse than this. Think we've blinded them yet, Monza?"

_I can feel their eyes on me. Staring. A little more. A little more, yes. I like what you've done with your hair, ma'am. Suits you._

The hellfire dancing in Rong-Arya's eyes flickered as she stared at him in bewilderment. "I'll take that as a 'no', then. Commander, have the escorts take up their positions when the fields are at forty per cent capacity. At sixty per cent, we begin the operation."

"Roger that, ma'am." Ichiro-Faust's anticipatory grin revealed row upon row of shark-like teeth.

According to the gods' received memories, summoning warp-storms to disrupt the enemy's movements and conceal one's own was a long-established tactic for the Old Gods' forces in the forty-first millennium. The fact that the soft, lazy civilisations outside the Great Wall lacked sufficient protection on their ships to weather even a mild storm only made it even more effective. The Bureau fleet was trapped in realspace, with no idea of what was coming for them.

Tension crackled like lightning through the high, vaulted room, the gargoyles in the corners twitching with bloodlust. Cassandra plopped down onto her adoptive mother's lap, bouncing up and down excitedly. Rong-Arya studied her fondly with one eye, whilst monitoring the Geller field capacitor gauge projected by her throne with the other. She wished she'd had 'bring your kids to work' days this fun in _her_ two past lives.

"Escorts are standing by, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust stated at last. "Sensors crew say they're detecting movement from the Bureau ships – think they've figured out something's up."

_Damn._ "You mean they can see us?"

"Wouldn't go that far. They're arranging themselves into a sphere formation – decent all-around coverage, but no particular focus on our planned angles of attack. Think the sudden warp-storm spooked 'em, is all."

"Understood. The operation will go ahead as planned. The _Temptress_ and _Argus_ have the green light – it's time to show these weaklings how a war is _really_ fought. Hail Lord Tzintchi!"

The bridge crew's answering roar was almost deafening.

From the _Conqueror_'s perspective, the two frigates appeared to attack the enemy fleet from above and behind, one from the left, one from the right. Sending the support vessels in first was an unusual strategy, but the _Argus_'s psyker relays and the _Temptress_'s daemonic choirs would throw the already-confused Bureau forces into further disarray to envelop the two frigates. Besides, it wasn't as if heavily-armed, kilometre-long warships needed much babysitting.

Three enemy signatures vanished from the holographic display in a matter of seconds, destroyed before they could even react to the attackers emerging from the Warp. The sphere disintegrated, ships swarming outwards to envelop the frigates with their usual disconcerting speed. They had taken the bait.

"_Skulltaker_, _Virulence_, move in."

The next two frigates appeared from behind and below, their weapons hammering into the enemy's rear. One more signature disappeared, followed by another as the four Chaos warships began to coordinate their fire to devastating effect. On the admiral's lap, Cassandra squealed in delight. The battle had truly begun.

Though the sheer distances involved in space combat meant that Rong-Arya couldn't have seen the rest of their squadron even if the _Conqueror_ were in realspace along with them, she could nevertheless picture them in her mind's eye. The _Argus_, less a ship than an _idea_ of a ship, a skeletal array of metal and stone held together with blazing, sorcerous fire that discharged sheets of crawling warp-lightning into the enemy. The _Temptress_, its lavishly-decorated hull gleaming in the distant starlight as it whispered in the mages' minds with a thousand seductive voices. The _Virulence_, glistening nests like boils on its back disgorging wave after wave of festering, black-winged daemons. The _Skulltaker_, ludicrously oversized weapons blazing away from every square metre unadorned with elaborate trophy racks.

She had models of them, too. The _Argus_'s one was especially fiddly.

A pattern began to assert itself amongst the frantic manoeuvring of the battle, and Rong-Arya smiled savagely. The Bureau fleet had realised they were at a disadvantage, attempting to use their superior speed to slip away from the four escorts whilst their heavier vessels mounted a valiant rearguard action. Unfortunately, thanks to her careful calculation of the angles of attack and patterns of fire, only one escape route remained... and the _Conqueror_ was sat right in its way, hidden in the Warp.

From far below the engraved iron deck, the gentle, ever-present hum of the fusion reactors steadily rose in pitch and volume. Gauges spiked across the holographic display as the massive cruiser's weapons powered up, and lights blinked into existence as torpedo after torpedo was loaded into the forward tubes. She saw ethereal flames lap across the hull through the view-ports as a burning vortex of light emerged in front of the prow, the sure sign of an impending realspace transition.

"Stage Three is commencing," Admiral Rong-Arya said to the silent bridge, savouring every word. "Prepare to engage Task Force Harlaown."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Well, I've made quite enough references to the _Stiletto_ by now – only fair that its commander makes an appearance.

Readers of _The Open Door_ will note that Rong-Arya's encounter with the Cylons went rather differently here than in that fic. There, the _USS Mary S_- sorry, the _Stiletto_ shrugged off a nuclear bombardment designed to wipe out an entire planet's human population with barely a scratch to its paintwork despite being completely devoid of adequate protection, before effortlessly owning its assailants. The reasons for the change should be self-explanatory.


	39. Encounters in Space

**38. Encounters in Space**

Reality tore itself apart in front of the fleeing Bureau ships as a twisted leviathan nosed its way into realspace. The _Conqueror_'s dark-lances fired again and again, sending beams of solid night slicing into its enemies. On the bridge, Rong-Arya leaned back and let her command throne interface with the biomechanical ports at the base of her neck.

"Stand by to launch torpedoes. Full spread, centre of their formation."

"Full spread, aye," Lieutenant Commander Torres, the tactical officer, acknowledged. "Loading in coordinates... ready."

"Fire."

Her consciousness detached from her body, letting her sight pan out across the battlefield. It was impossible to see the engagement in its entirety without rendering the combatants near-invisibly small, but by focusing on particular areas, she could build up a good idea of what was happening. Sensor readouts were useful, certainly, but being able to see with one's own eyes in real-time was better... and combining the two was better still. She focused on the pursuing frigates, watching as the data on their shield strength, weapon status, and power usage appeared around them, before returning her gaze to her own cruiser as the torpedoes launched.

For a Zeruel-class warship, a 'full spread' meant a total of twenty-four fifty-metre-long missiles, each loaded with a two-stage antimatter warhead. Rong-Arya tracked them as they sped towards their destination, their manoeuvring thrusters flaring as they altered their course to accommodate the Bureau ships' movements. As they approached, the mages' automated defences began to fire on them, sending one torpedo after another to spiral away, their warheads detonating uselessly as the containment fields shut down.

It wasn't enough, though.

The remaining torpedoes' nose-cones opened like petals on a flower, nozzles emerging from their depths to spray the space ahead with clouds of colourless gas. They decelerated, the thrust from the nozzles impeding their flight as the gas spread outwards... and then they released their antimatter reserves.

Reliable antimatter production, along with the towering Evangelions and the inexhaustible S2 engines, was one of Chaos's greatest gains from the encounters with the strange beings called 'Angels' prior to Third Impact. As a weapon, though, it had certain disadvantages – in particular, the fact that it needed to react with a considerable amount of matter to achieve the maximum effect, making it rather less useful in space combat unless one was guaranteed a direct hit on the enemy. The solution was an adaption of the fuel-air bomb concept, seeding the target area with gas in order to allow the blast created by the direct matter-annihilation process to become a fleet-demolishing fireball. It didn't even need to be particularly _reactive_ gas, but Chaos's engineers had never been ones to do things by halves... which was why Rong-Arya spent the next few seconds blinking away the glowing afterimages that danced in front of her eyes as the light from seventeen huge explosions slowly died away.

"Sensors, how many of them did we get?"

"One moment, ma'am, just having a look... wait, all ten of the remaining ships are still intact! Their shields absorbed the blasts!"

"Damnation – they must have figured out our plan of attack. Good to know this Admiral Harlaown has _some_ of his reputation for a reason, at least. Have the escorts advance and hem them in – they've wasted too much time with that rearguard. Three ships should not be presenting them with that many- hold on, what're they doing?"

The Bureau fleet scattered, ships pairing off to attack individual Chaos vessels. Cornered and outmanoeuvred, they had no choice but to fight. Magical bolts and kinetic weapons tore into the _Conqueror_'s void shields as the two frigates engaging it projected a dizzying array of illusions, making them seem to be attacking from a dozen directions at once.

"Tactical, why aren't those two dead yet?" the admiral demanded.

"It's those accelerator spells they're using, ma'am," Torres explained. "Our turrets simply can't traverse fast enough to keep up with them – warp-infused lasers may be about as accurate as weapons can get, but only if they're pointed the right way. As for the disintegrators... well, you get the picture."

"That I do, Tactical. Monza, have the _Argus_ try to nullify their magic. You can ease up on the direct attacks, if that helps – the others can handle that."

_Aye, ma'am._ The corrupted mage didn't throw in any cheery non-sequiturs this time, for which she was profoundly grateful.

The latest generation of Chaos warships were designed to be as self-sufficient as possible, capable of fighting for months at a time without maintenance or resupply. For this reason, they were almost exclusively equipped with energy weapons like lasers and plasma cannons, in order to exploit the ability of S2 engines to generate a fixed amount of energy for an indefinite amount of time. These weapons, as usual with Chaos technology, had borrowed a few tricks from another civilisation – specifically, the so-called 'dark eldar' of Commoragh, progenitors of the Old God Slaanesh, whose weapons systems were augmented with the power of the Warp to boost their effectiveness to physics-defying levels. It had worked like a charm, both on the _Stiletto_'s maiden voyages and in the recent border skirmishes, but Rong-Arya couldn't help but wish for a few hundred more homing missiles instead at the moment. Direct-fire weaponry had its limitations.

She started to return her attention to the battle, attempting to plan the best formation to set up a proper crossfire, when Commander Smirnov of the _Skulltaker_ cut in, his mechanically-augmented voice harsh with panic.

"Admiral, we've got boarders! They're in Engineering, shooting up everything in sight – no idea how they got in. We're trying to move our Marine squads up to drive them back, but I don't think they'll get there in- _ohgodsno_!"

The admiral watched in horror as strings of explosions rippled across the assault frigate's hull, followed by the chain-lightning effect of a warp-drive going critical. The _Skulltaker_ imploded, its twisted fragments falling away into a colossal tear in realspace, and she knew there had been no survivors.

The comm-channels were flooded with the sounds of panic, everyone trying to make themselves heard at once. They couldn't accept it, she knew. They simply couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that such a titan could fall so swiftly and easily. They had never been trapped on a silent, drifting ship, watching helplessly as relentless enemies slowly peeled away its armour with wave after wave of nuclear fire.

"All remaining units, move into combat range of each other and initiate Fire Pattern Sigma," she said quietly, her calm voice slicing through the tumult of the bridge. "_Argus_, divert all power from anti-ship weaponry to magic neutralisation, and leave behind only enough for shields and point-defences. All other vessels, keep them covered whilst watching your own backsides. A long-range teleport, going straight through an assault frigate's void shields... that was the Bureau's technosorcery, wasn't it, Monza?"

_Oh, yes. Don't they have the most wonderful toys? Still, can't have them hurting the admiral's lovely warships. That wouldn't be right. Not right at all. They've been bad, and bad children get their toys taken away from them, yes. We can silence their voices, freeze their machinery, just as you have seen it. The admiral is wise, yes. Most wise. Such lovely hair, too. Even if it is prehensile._

"... Glad to hear it. Everyone else, keep the ECM active. Not sure how well it'll work against magic, but if we're lucky, we can gum up their targeting software enough to keep them from doing it again." She held Cassandra close, whispering soothing platitudes into her mind as the little girl sobbed in fear.

"Aye, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust replied with his usual stoicism. "Message coming in from the _Virulence_ – sending it through."

"Morning, Admiral," Captain Macmillan's voice drawled in the bubbling, disease-wracked tones of a follower of Reigle. "They just tried the stunt that took down the _Skulltaker_ on us. Long story short, we've got a nice little collection of combat mages for you, wrapped up all sweet and docile now they've stopped trying to scream. Bit past their sell-by date, though – don't think those 'Barrier Jackets' they use work too well as hazmat suits. Wait – we're starting to get necrosis. Think it'd be best to lower the dose. Sorry, ma'am – gotta go."

Rong-Arya grinned, her fangs glinting in the dim light. "No need to hurry on my account, captain. Film them, and loop the recording on all channels – it should discourage them from doing it again before the _Argus_ shuts them down. When we stand to capture a fleet, the lives of a few boarders are irrelevant... and besides, I think a little payback for the loss of our sister-ship is necessary."

The unhealthiness of Macmillan's answering chuckle had absolutely nothing to do with his physical condition. "You got it, ma'am. Always wanted to try my hand as a movie director."

The admiral made a note to secure a copy for Cassandra's personal viewing – her daughter always liked to see Reigle's followers at play, and the recording would likely prove highly educational. In the meantime, though, she had other concerns. The _Conqueror_ was taking damage from behind, and the void shields didn't seem to be helping one bit.

"Sensors, where's that attack coming from?" she demanded.

"One of the two frigates attacking us slipped through our shields, ma'am," the tech-priest explained, his artificial limbs jabbing desperately at his console. "They're right by our stern, unloading everything they've got into the engines. I don't... I don't think they can hold out much longer!"

"What about the close-range batteries? Shouldn't they have cleared them away by now?"

"The engine block's in the way," Torres interjected. "We've got this great big blind spot hanging off our rear end, and they're right in the middle of it. Just... see for yourself, ma'am."

Rong-Arya did so, and saw that her tactical officer was right. They did actually have some turrets covering the area immediately behind the engines, but they were intended to stave off fighters, not a warship, and those that weren't mangled, drifting wreckage already might as well have been shooting peas at a wall for all the effect they were having. The frigate's return fire, on the other hand, was considerably more effective – even with the armoured shutters that slid into place whenever they weren't firing the engines, several thrusters were already beyond repair, and it was only a matter of time before a shot ended up in the main reactor. A ship scarcely a hundredth of their size had them at its mercy, and there was nothing they could do about it, unless...

Her eyes widened, hellfire pouring out of the sockets as the idea took root. They weren't entirely devoid of weapons after all – in fact, they had over half a dozen enormous plasma lances pointed straight at the Bureau frigate.

"Prepare for acceleration," she ordered. "Engineering, all-ahead flank. Fire everything."

The red-robed priest looked up, his ocular implants buzzing as they tried to focus on his commanding officer. "But admiral, the engines won't-"

"I am _aware_ of that, Brother Choi. All hands, brace for impact."

Choi cringed, avoiding her burning eyes. "Bracing for impact, ma'am. Engines firing in three, two, one..."

The _Conqueror_ lurched forward, a tremor shuddering down its four-kilometre length as inertial compensators failed left and right. The crew in the unprotected sectors were hurled into bulkheads and instrument panels, bones breaking and organs rupturing as the phenomenal G-forces slowly crushed them. The abused thrusters simply disintegrated, sending a wall of white-hot plasma and spinning debris slamming into the enemy frigate. It never stood a chance.

"Engineering, how much manoeuvring capability do we have left?" she asked once the shaking had stopped, and the whine of the bridge's dedicated compensators had died down.

It took the tech-priest a while to answer. "Retros are working fine, and we've still got most of the manoeuvring thrusters along the hull. Main engines are completely gone, though – we can decelerate, but not accelerate. No reactor damage, though. We managed to cut the lines before the blowback hit."

"Excellent. Helm, get us pointed back at the main engagement, and put us into a roll once the compensators are all working again. We're a sitting duck at the moment, and the shields should work better if the enemy's fire is evenly-distributed across them."

"... Aye, ma'am."

"Is there a problem, lieutenant?" she asked coolly.

"No, ma'am. No problem. I'll get right on it."

"Good. Do so."

He was waiting for her to ask after the crew they'd lost, to demonstrate the fierce protectiveness for their own that was Chaos's hallmark. They all were. She wouldn't do it, though – not until they no longer had heavily-armed mages crawling all over them. Sentiment could wait. The Cylons had taught her the value of sacrifice, and she would have to thank them for it someday. Antimatter bombardment would likely be involved.

The _Argus_ was doing its work well – the Bureau ships were slower and less agile, and their spells were becoming increasingly feeble. As she watched, the _Conqueror_'s disintegrator batteries finally bracketed their second attacker, hundreds of warp-infused plasma bolts tearing it to ribbons. Meanwhile, the _Virulence_'s daemon-swarms enveloped a light cruiser, its point-defences simply running out of ammo as thousands of soundlessly shrieking abominations descended on it like flies on rotten meat.

"Have you figured out which one's Harlaown's flagship yet?" she asked.

"Sorry, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust replied. "Still haven't got through their comm-encryption yet. If it were me, though, I'd place money on the heavy cruiser engaging the _Temptress_. From what we know, this Admiral Harlaown's a decent tactician and strategist, but nothing special magic-wise. That cruiser hasn't done anything particularly spectacular so far, and it's close enough to the centre of their formation – insofar as they have one – for a lot of their biggest ships to give it covering fire. Perfect place for the brains of the operation."

Rong-Arya smiled at him, causing him to shuffle uncomfortably. "Good call, commander. Can we move any of our other assets to engage that thing? Odds are that Harlaown knows he's the weak link. Some extra pressure, and he might start making mistakes."

"Think I can help with that, admiral," Commander Endymion of the _Temptress_ commented from the bridge's speakers. "My lovely little choristers finally got someone to sing back to them – several someones, in fact. The TSAB heavy frigate _Bright Star_ is at your disposal, all clean and shiny."

"Good work, Endymion. Macmillan, how're your pets doing with that cruiser?"

"It's battered, but functional," the disease-worshipper replied. "They're ready and waiting for your orders, ma'am. Time to give them a taste of their own medicine?"

"Exactly my thoughts. Have the captured vessels engage the target designated HC-2. Anything that gets in their way is fair game, but not the priority."

"Aye, ma'am," the two shipmasters chorused.

Though the _Conqueror_ had begun its roll, the stars cartwheeling past the bridge's viewports in a dizzying whirl, steadying the projected vision granted by the command throne was the work of an instant. The admiral zoomed in on the sleek form of the _Bright Star_ as it moved to attack its erstwhile comrades, imagining the crew's stiff, jerky movements as they were guided like puppets by the _Temptress_'s siren song. To use the enemy's strength against them was a basic tenet of Chaos's doctrine, and direct mental manipulation was perhaps the purest expression of that. Were they completely lulled, calm and happy in their betrayal, or were they still trying to resist, some small part of their addled psyches wailing in terror inside their heads as their ensorcelled bodies refused to obey them? She hoped for the latter – it seemed an appropriate fate for those who sought to impose their will on the gods.

The two captured ships opened fire, their target's shields sparking and flaring under the impact... and died in an instant. There was a flash of light, a suggestion of movement, and a pair of explosions – that was all. Rong-Arya was left stunned, blinking in surprise for a moment before she played back the recording of the past few seconds. The Bureau fleet's other heavy cruiser had teleported between them, two thin whips of blue light shooting out of its sides to slice them in half before it jumped away again. They hadn't even had a chance to register its presence, let alone summon shields of their own. _So somebody wants to play bodyguard? This might be trickier than I anticipated._

The _Temptress_'s rate-of-fire decreased and it heeled to one side as the backlash from the death of its puppets hit, disrupting its connection to the Warp. The Bureau fleet was swift to take advantage. As the two heavy cruisers provided covering fire, weaving madly between the huge Chaos vessels, the remaining ships broke away to take up formation just outside the combat zone, three of them extending and overlapping their shields to protect the fourth. _What are they- oh, no._

"Admiral, the ship marked as LC-3 is charging its main cannon!" the sensors officer yelled, only confirming her suspicions.

The devastating time/space distortion cannons the Bureau called 'Arc-en-ciels' were far and away their most powerful weapons, and had presented an overwhelming advantage in their first engagements against Chaos. Once their primary weakness had been discovered, though – namely, their unfortunate habit of exploding when their charge cycle was disrupted – they had rapidly fallen out of favour... until now. Apparently, the mages had figured out a work-around.

"All units, focus your fire on that central ship!" she commanded, trying to keep her voice level. "Monza, I want that shield down _now_!"

_But ma'am, the psykers! They're full with the Warp, inflated like balloons! Any more, and they'll pop, and the colours will leak into the void!_ His facial tubes quivered agitatedly even as a hysterical giggle entered his voice at the mental image, grating on Rong-Arya's last remaining nerve.

She growled, a low, animal sound that set the bridge crew's hair (and feathers) standing on end. "See that cannon, Monza? It's pointed at the _Conqueror_. I don't give a flying crap how many clones' brains get fried – if that thing fires, we all die. Now cut the bullshit, get on the horn to the _Argus_, and have them _drop that shield_."

The renegade mage straightened, and sketched a hasty salute – he might have been insane, but he wasn't stupid. _Of course, admiral. My apologies._

The next two minutes seemed more like hours, as the weakened shield gradually crumbled away under the Chaos ships' fire whilst LC-3's energy readings spiked higher and higher. Ominous red icons appeared around the _Argus_ as its clone-psykers died in their dozens, their bodies rupturing and minds collapsing as the Warp overtook them. Cassandra was quiet and still where she sat, sensing the tension in the adults around her even without knowing what it was about. Finally, the wards collapsed, the readings falling as the light cruiser's captain elected to cancel the charging sequence rather than risk wiping out his own fleet. It worked, but did not save him or his ship from the incoming hail of energised doom.

"Fine, crisis averted," the admiral commented lightly as the remaining ships of the bombardment formation scattered once more. "Any _other_ nasty surprises they've decided to throw at us?"

_Well, I've got good news and bad news there,_ Lieutenant Monza said, his dreamily irrepressible cheerfulness already restored. _Good news, we've finally hacked their comms. Bad news, they've hacked ours. Oh, and now the _Argus_ has lost half its psykers, marker HC-1 broke through the magic-disruption field and teleported inside their shields. Just, you know, FYI._

"Why the _hell_ didn't you mention that last bit first?" Rong-Arya roared.

_Well, symmetry, of course. It would have ruined the otherwise-perfect good news/bad news balance in a manner quite unacceptable. Have you not read Lady Mislaato's treatise on the aesthetics of warfare, admiral? It's very-_

She slammed down her mental barriers, blocking off the lieutenant's babble whilst barely resisting the urge to perform an immediate field execution. Not for the first time, she wished that she'd been a little more insistent in skimming psykers from Bloodhaven. _Next time we resupply, I'm getting a new sorcery officer._

Even so, she soon saw that Monza's tardiness had not changed anything – the _Argus_ had been doomed from the moment HC-1, the bodyguard-ship, had appeared next to it. The heavy cruiser was not using its whips this time – instead, an endless rain of sword-shaped, azure bolts was pouring into the Arael-class's framework, intricate runes shattering and impossible structures unravelling as its otherworldly aura bucked and thrashed like a wounded beast. Finally, it simply disintegrated with a final, psychic howl, leaving behind a rapidly spreading cloud of wreckage that seemed to occupy several more dimensions than the usual three.

The support frigate's death rippled across the Warp, the storm it had created already disappearing. In a matter of seconds, the tide of battle had changed, as the Bureau ships regained not only their powers, but a chance of escape.

Atop her command-throne, Rong-Arya swore.

The _Argus_'s destroyer had not stuck around to survey its handiwork, instead reappearing between the _Virulence_ and two of its surviving comrades to shield them from the plague-ship's broadside. The mages were peeling away from their ambushers, having made the perfectly sensible decision to flee with their tails between their legs before any more of them got killed/captured/horribly violated/all three in no particular order.

The daemonhost, of course, intended to have none of that. "Helm, cancel our spin. They're not shooting at us enough for it to matter, and I want to have some manoeuvring capacity back. Monza, do we have _any_ psychic assets remaining?"

_Already on it, admiral,_ the mage replied, all puppy-like enthusiasm at being useful again. _I'm setting up an interlinked network using the sorcerers on our three remaining ships – it won't nearly match up to what the Argus was capable of, but should slow them down a little. I even made sure they know your opinion on psyker casualties, so you can rest assured that they're willing to get their cerebella nice and sizzly if the situation demands._

"Hopefully, that won't be necessary, but I appreciate the effort," she said drily, trying to ignore the way he puffed himself up at her words. "Since you mentioned they're listening in, we'll use that as the replacement for our comm-channels. First thing, send a message to the _Temptress_. They're tasked with intercepting the retreating ships – particularly and especially HC-2, now Harlaown's bodyguard is distracted – and holding them up until we and the _Virulence_ can get there. Commander Endymion has my full permission to fulfil this goal by any means he deems appropriate. Next..."

"One moment, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust interrupted diffidently. "The intelligence department just finished parsing the enemy fleet's decoded transmissions, and it seems my guess was off the mark. Admiral Harlaown is in fact commanding HC-1."

She blinked at him. "You're kidding."

"I'm afraid not. Sorry, ma'am. I've linked the transcripts to your throne, in case you want to check."

The text scrolled past her eyes, but she wasn't looking at it. Instead, she watched the duel between HC-1 and the _Virulence_ – in particular, the peculiar way the former was using its shields. Rather than absorbing the assault frigate's attacks as per normal, it was _redirecting_ them, ensuring that they passed by harmlessly with only the slightest exertion from the mage responsible. She revisited the recordings of its brief engagements with the _Argus_ and _Bright Star, _noting the energy readings that Sensors had picked up as it launched its attacks. Relatively speaking, they had not actually been very powerful, instead calculated to strike at their targets' weakest points with an almost terrifying degree of precision.

The intelligence they had received was accurate – Admiral Chrono Harlaown clearly did not possess much magical power. Where they had gone wrong was in assuming that he considered this a handicap.

_Hold on... haven't I seen this before?_

Rong-Arya knew this type of person. A prodigy capable of taking on ridiculous odds by themselves, too young and cocky to know the taste of defeat. They would go to any length to protect those they deemed their comrades simply because they believed they could, because they couldn't conceive an enemy that could actually overcome them. In short, it was exactly how she had been before her encounter with the Cylons... and that meant that for all they were at a tactical disadvantage, for all that the enemy was slipping through their fingers, she knew how to beat them.

"Monza, belay that last order," she said, a slow smile creeping across her face. "The _Temptress_ will continue to harass the retreating enemies, but its primary objective is now to cut them off from HC-1. Destruction or capture of other vessels is welcome, but unnecessary. Meanwhile, we and the _Virulence_ will disable Harlaown's flagship – engines first, then weapons systems. A concerted effort from that network of yours will likely help with that."

_Processed and sent, ma'am. Been a while since I last saw good old Chrono – should be nice to chat with him again._

"You'll get your chance, lieutenant. Tactical, have all available weapon systems ready to fire on my mark. Let's end this."

"You got it, ma'am," Torres replied with unholy relish.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Finally – someone even worse at dealing with failure than Teana Lanster. Guess they were bound to turn up sooner or later.

Also, it seems that Mid-Childan mages really don't make for the greatest evil minions. You'd have thought they'd have figured that out after picking up dear, psychotic old Precia...


	40. Family Values

**39. Family Values**

Thirty seconds later, every dark lance battery on the _Conqueror_'s left flank fired at once, meeting the _Virulence_'s barrage to form a spidery web of darkness that wrapped itself around HC-1 like a shroud. It was five seconds after that when the disintegrators joined in, the heavy cruiser's shield steadily brightening as it struggled to deflect the continent-melting broadside directed against it.

Harlaown's thousand-sword spell lashed out again, pattering against the _Virulence_'s own shields with negligible effect, and Rong-Arya couldn't help but let loose a sadistic chuckle. As countless Alpha Quadrant, Cylon, and Praxis commanders had found out, voids didn't have weak spots to hit.

She remembered sitting helpless on a bridge lit only by dull red emergency lighting, listening as frantic crewmen pounded on useless weapon controls, as one casualty report after another trickled through the speakers, the daemons inhabiting the comms system giving each name a bitterly mocking edge, and the distant rumble of nuclear detonations echoed through the hull. The stars had been faint but clear through the _Stiletto_'s viewports, dimmed by the light of the explosions creeping across the frigate's surface. She remembered staring at them as she waited for the next missile to hit the bridge, wondering whether or not she would even see it coming. _You should be thanking me, Harlaown. This is for your own good, you know._

The heavy cruiser tried to break away, zipping across the _Conqueror_'s prow, but it was too late. The shield collapsed, and a hundred beams sliced into HC-1 at once. The engines were first to go, exploding in almost-beautiful gouts of wispy, polychromatic light, followed by the four Arc-en-ciel fins, removed from the main hull with a series of almost surgically-elegant cuts that left behind only partially-melted stumps of metal. The remainder took out the main coilgun batteries, leaving behind only a few point-defence turrets that were swiftly dealt with by a second salvo. _Checkmate._

"Have the _Virulence_ prepare for boarding – we'll cover them in case Harlaown wants to try something funny. The _Temptress_ will- _crap_!"

The four fleeing Bureau ships had, as one, changed direction, barrelling back towards their beleaguered commander with all guns blazing. The _Temptress_ was doing its best, but against an entire squadron's worth of angry mages, it was quite literally getting taken to pieces.

"_Temptress_, you are ordered to evacuate!" the admiral screamed down the line, heedless of whoever might be listening in. "For Tzintchi's sake, Endymion, _get your people out of there NOW_!"

The Mislaato-worshipper's reply was almost inaudible over the static, shouting, and crackling of distant fires that accompanied it. "... it... ma'am... sorry... we..."

Endymion's ship kept firing until the end, even as its hull melted away and its reactors died one by one, even as escape pods showered out of its underside. His final act as commander, in the seconds before a grapefruit-sized projectile struck the _Temptress_'s bridge with the force of an eight-megaton warhead, was to personally launch two antimatter torpedoes at almost point-blank range into HC-2, laughing madly all the while.

A few moments later, the support frigate's S2 engines overloaded in a chain reaction, ripping it apart from the inside.

The Bureau cruiser coasted out of the twin fireball left by the torpedoes, trailing debris, with its wards flickering and its projector fins reduced to a fused, ruined mess. It took up station alongside the wreckage of the Chaos ship along with a light frigate, the two vessels overlapping their shields as their compatriots continued to advance towards the crippled HC-1.

"Commander, what are those two doing?" Rong-Arya asked softly.

"They... they appear to be picking up the _Temptress_'s escape pods, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust replied, tactfully scooping up Cassandra and putting as much distance between himself and his commanding officer as possible. "They're taking its crew prisoner."

"Understood." The command throne screeched faintly as her claws sank into its arm-rests. "The squadron's remaining batteries will fire upon the two ships headed towards us until there is nothing left of them but dust and ashes. Meanwhile, we will launch another full spread of torpedoes, this time at the _Temptress_'s last known location."

Torres stared at her. "Wait, the _Temptress_? But-"

"Executive Order Number 74," the admiral carried on in the exact same tone of voice, "states that allowing oneself to be captured by the enemies of the gods, and by extension the enemies of humanity, is an offense punishable by death at a minimum. Incidentally, the next person to question my orders will have their skin added to the Conqueror's trophy racks. This is not in accordance with an Executive Order – I shall do it of my own volition. Just so we're clear here."

The tactical officer turned very, very pale. "R-roger that, ma'am. Launching torpedoes."

A swarm of burning sparks streaked from the Zeruel-class's prow, zeroing in on their target with alarming speed. The two ships attempting to assist Harlaown's cruiser opened fire with their point-defences, but the incoming barrage from the _Virulence_ and _Conqueror_ was too much of a distraction and power-drain for their shots to have much effect. HC-2 and its attendant frigate would have to deal with the problem on their own.

Rong-Arya leaned forwards, the ports in her neck detaching from her throne. "Since Third Impact, our species has grown strong. Every one of us is precious to and beloved of the gods, and all they demand in return is our undying loyalty. To fail them, to breach that trust and aid our enemies by yielding to them, is to no longer be human, merely debris to be swept aside. The Bureau does not understand this. They rush blindly in to help their weakling of a commander even when he is defeated and helpless, even when he is no longer worthy of their devotion. For this, every last one of them will die. For this, Harlaown shall curse their names even as we drag him screaming to the Hall of Torments."

She smiled glassily at her tactical officer. "Torres, are those ships looting the _Temptress_ dead yet?"

"N-negative, ma'am. They used the wreck as cover, and while they still took damage, they're operational."

"I see. The tubes have been reloaded by now, yes? Another torpedo spread, please. Same target."

"Affirmative. One moment..."

Their two targets had clearly had enough, slipping away into the Warp seconds before the next wave of antimatter explosions reached them, but the admiral wasn't looking at them any more when she relinked with the throne. Instead, the three ships immediately in front of the Conqueror were the focus of her attention.

HC-1's rescuers were a frigate and light cruiser, taking up position on either side of their wounded comrade. An aura of golden light embraced the flagship as the smaller ships began to telekinetically drag it with them, even as dozens of beams and hundreds of plasma bolts hammered into their failing shields.

"Another spread, Tactical," Rong-Arya said, still in the same quiet, calm monotone. "This time, at HC-1's escorts."

Opening his mouth at that moment was quite possibly the bravest thing Lieutenant Torres did in his life. "Admiral, we're out of ammo. That last salvo drained what was left of our ordnance reserves."

"The _Virulence_ still has torpedoes loaded, does it not? _Another spread_, Tactical."

Even though the admiral's burning eyes were gazing blankly at a point somewhere in the middle-distance, it took only a moment of looking at them for the tactical officer's nerve to fail him. "Of course, ma'am."

The assault frigate's attack came from above, bracketing the enemy formation with explosions. The _Virulence_ had only twelve tubes, rather than the _Conqueror_'s twenty-four, but the beleaguered Bureau ships' shields were at their limits. The frigate simply disintegrated, whilst the only reason the light cruiser survived at all was because the glittering nimbus of Harlaown's custom deflector spared them from the worst of the damage.

The battered little warship pulled away, leaving its flagship behind – none of which stopped HC-1 from continuing to ward it against the endless bombardment from the Chaos weapon batteries. _So that idiot _still_ doesn't understand..._

"Launch another."

"With all due respect, ma'am, I must ask you to reconsider."

Rong-Arya decoupled herself again, and stared down at her executive officer, who was standing in front of her with an expression of grim determination on his face. "I beg your pardon, commander?"

"The last enemy that could conceivably hurt us is retreating," Ichiro-Faust continued. "The only thing another salvo would do is run the risk of destroying HC-1 and killing our target. I repeat, ma'am – please reconsider."

The admiral reached down to her belt, pulling out a long flaying-knife that she began to toss up and down in one hand. "I'm sorry, but would you happen to be _questioning me_?"

The other daemonhost just grinned. "Why, yes, I suppose I am. So would you like to put that knife to use immediately, or shall I go and have it sharpened? Looks a tad rusty."

There was a long, frozen moment, and then she smiled back. "It'd take too long to get another second-in-command. Belay that last order, Tactical."

"Roger that, ma'am." Torres shot the executive officer a look of pure gratitude.

Rong-Arya sheathed the knife, and then paused to take a few deep breaths as she watched the last of the Bureau's light cruisers escape. Until that moment, she hadn't even realised exactly how angry she was.

"Right, fine," she announced at last to nobody in particular. "Freak-out over. I'm calm, I'm collected, and I'm cool as a cucumber. Everything is going according to plan. Now, where were we? Ah, yes. Boarding HC-1. With our engines in the state they're in, it'd probably be best if the _Virulence_ handles that. Up for taking a few more prisoners, Macmillan?"

"Any time, admiral," the Reiglite replied cheerfully. "Rest assured – we'll try to keep these ones in better repair."

"Good to hear. Incidentally, commander, would you mind giving Cassie back? Thanks."

No sooner had Ichiro-Faust handed the little girl back to her mother than she wriggled back onto the admiral's lap, staring up at her with her huge, blue eyes. In return, the daemonhost looked down at her daughter fondly.

"Hi, honey. Hope I didn't scare you."

Cassandra considered this for a moment with a four-year-old's infinite wisdom. "S'alright."

With that, she curled up and fell asleep, sucking her thumb self-consciously.

Back outside the _Conqueror_, Captain Macmillan had already begun his ship's boarding action. Again, the assault frigate could not bring nearly the same resources to bear as a cruiser, but the Bardiel-class had been specifically designed for this sort of work, and it showed. It positioned itself above the Bureau flagship, its underbelly cracking open like an unholy hybrid between a mouth and a ribcage to disgorge a colossal swarm of jagged, insectile boarding craft. With its weapons gone, the heavy cruiser could do nothing but drift helplessly as the Dreadclaw assault pods burrowed into its hull like gigantic, mechanical maggots, disgorging squad after squad of hulking Space Marines, mutated crewmen, and gibbering daemons into its interior.

Rong-Arya drew on the power of the Warp, inserting herself into Lieutenant Monza's makeshift psychic network. The array of psykers lay before her like a constellation, clustered in their two warships but with a steady stream pouring into HC-1. She focused on these last ones, looking around for a bit before she found the signature she wanted. A moment later, she opened her eyes again, the telepathic link established.

_How's it going so far, brother-captain?_

_Not as well as it might be, ma'am,_ Brother-Captain Typhraxis the Corrupted, Ravager of the Weak, commander and incurable self-nicknamer of the _Virulence_'s Space Marine company, replied. _They've got some nasty automated defences fitted on this thing – even us Terminators are finding it slow going, and everyone without ceramite armour... well, they're just getting taken apart. I'm reformulating our battle-plan, but expect some heavy casualties before I'm done._

_Understood. What about from an electronic-warfare stance?_

If_ anything, even tougher. They've really hardened their networks since our initial assault on their homeworld. Our tech-priests are making progress, sure, but it'll be a while before we manage to crack them open._

_We don't _have_ 'a while'. I'll have Monza devote some of his network to helping you out – that should make things easier. Don't fail me, Typhraxis._

_Of course, ma'am. _

That done, she sat back and straightened her hair, a complicated procedure that initially involved persuading it to let go of the throne. There was nothing as valuable as a good first impression, after all.

"Commander, open a communications link to HC-1's bridge."

Ichiro-Faust simply saluted, pressed the appropriate button with a theatrical flourish, and backed away to let his commanding officer work her magic as Admiral Chrono Harlaown's face appeared on the bridge's main screen.

The two admirals made for an odd contrast. Harlaown was a serious-looking, conventionally handsome young man whose dark, slightly overgrown hair did nothing to conceal the bags under his eyes or the trail of dried blood leading from one corner of his mouth. He wore what could only be his Barrier Jacket, a black-and-silver garment that vaguely resembled a priest's cassock with dull metal spikes at the shoulders, creating a rather medieval aesthetic that clashed oddly with his ship's shiny, high-tech interior.

Whilst Rong-Arya's appearance was similarly anachronistic, her choice of time-period was rather different, opting for nineteenth-century flamboyance as interpreted through the warped lens of Chaos. In addition to the claws, the fangs, and the hellfire pouring from her eye-sockets, she had a small, neat pair of horns protruding from her forehead, and a whip-like tail currently curled around her body. Her chest was adorned with dozens of medals, an array of gleaming gold and non-Euclidean geometry, and her uniform was mostly comprised of the sort of pale leather that had clearly come from nothing quadrupedal, plus generous amounts of braid twisted into impossible, disquieting patterns. The overall impression was of a slender, diabolically stylish, and slightly over-decorated luxury office chair – an impression only reinforced by the small child on her knees, who was waving sleepily at the mage on the screen.

"Admiral Harlaown," the daemonhost drawled. "I've heard a lot about you. Nice to meet you face-to-face."

"As have I about you, Captain Rong-Arya," Harlaown replied formally. "Some of it even polite."

Rong-Arya simply smiled. "It's 'Admiral' now, actually, but I'll forgive you for making the mistake."

"No mistake. It's Bureau policy to address a criminal by the title they went by when the crimes were committed. So what did you want to talk to me about, _captain_?"

She hoped the channel's audio-pickup wasn't sharp enough to detect the noise of grinding teeth. "Why, your surrender, of course."

The stripling actually had the nerve to _laugh_. "Ah. Of course. Captain, I've seen the New Syracuse labour-camps. I watched the video of what you did to our boarding-party. Given all that, how can you _possibly_ believe that I would willingly surrender to you? Please, help me out – I'm drawing blanks here."

Rong-Arya's fangs gleamed. "You know, that's a really good question. Brother-Captain Typhraxis, kill one-third of his crew. Slowly."

Cassandra, meanwhile, had woken up entirely, and was squeaking in delight. "Make him watch! Mama, make him watch!"

Her mother beamed at her and drew her into a tight hug, causing her to giggle uncontrollably. "A wonderful idea, honey. Typhraxis, have your men record their kills, and link them up to the comm-screen. I'm sure it'll be fun for all the family."

She looked back up at her opponent. "Children really are a blessing, aren't they, Harlaown? Take Cassie here, for instance. The Federation was going to let her entire homeworld's population die, do you know that? All to appease that ridiculous edict they call the Prime Directive. No, wait, of course you knew that – it's not like you'd just jump into an alliance with someone without doing your homework, right? Is it fun, working with a bunch of milquetoast bureaucrats without the _balls_ to do what's right?"

"Not so much as deciding to demolish an entire galactic civilisation and everything in their general vicinity because of the actions of a dozen or so of their scientists evidently was," Harlaown replied lightly. "Different strokes for different folks, I guess."

Rong-Arya ignored him. "You have kids too, don't you? See – I told you I'd done my research. A big, happy family. How many is it now? I lost count. Tell me, how do you think _they'd_ react if you died here and now? Should we rub it in a little? Send back fingers? Your heart? Maybe even your face? I'm sure we could give it a lovely little frame."

This time, it was the mage's turn to not reply, but she saw the muscle twitch in the side of his jaw. _Gotcha._

"Of course, that isn't the first time that's happened to your family, is it?" she continued. "Remember your dad, Harlaown? Remember how he died, fighting to the last as his ship was destroyed around him? Remember how that made you feel? How old are some of them now, Harlaown? Old enough to deal with it as you did? _I don't think so_."

Harlaown's face was pale and taut now, his skin waxen.

"And then there's your wife. Pretty little Amy Limiette. Now, I don't know the exact details of the Bureau's widows-and-orphans fund, but I do know that in the long run, those things are never quite enough, especially with a brood as big as yours. How long until it starts running dry? How long until she has to start supplementing her income the fast and easy way? Do you think her meal-tickets will care for your children? Do you think they'll even _notice_ them? As for her... well, there's only one way things can end, after you've abandoned her with half-a-dozen-or-so mouths to feed and no real support. How many do you think she'll spread her legs for before she starts to resent you? How many before she _forgets_ you? Come on now, make a bet. For me."

"You_ bitch_..." he grated.

The daemonhost chuckled throatily. "Appreciate the compliment, sugar, but you should know that I don't go for the married ones. Still, I'm feeling charitable, and that's why I'm going to tell you that there's another option. A way that you can be with the people you love, whilst experiencing rewards beyond your wildest imaginings. Monza – you're up."

Harlaown recoiled as the corrupted mage shuffled into the light, his hand-claw clicking softly. "Wait – _Florio_? Is that you?"

Rong-Arya smiled thinly at his reaction, and went back to checking up on the status of the boarding mission. _Typhraxis, I'm not seeing a whole lot of recorded deaths here yet. Talk to me._

_That's because we haven't _found_ anyone yet, ma'am – just dozens and dozens of mines, barriers, and sentry-turrets. Good news is we've almost got through their electronics – that sorcerer network's really helping. I'll let you know when we're in their system._

_Good. Do so._

As she spoke, Monza's facial tubes writhed and spread apart with a hideous sucking sound, forcing even the _Conqueror_'s bridge crew to look away. A mouth opened between them, too wide and in entirely the wrong place on his head, filled with jagged, uneven teeth and a nest of worm-like tongues.

"Hiya, Chrono," he rasped, every word seeming to come from several dozen throats at once. "Long time no see."

"Kaiser's blood, man, what happened to you? What did they _do_ to you?"

"Do? They did nothing. I _chose_ this. What I see now... it's not just this grey, mundane world we live in. I can't describe it. You can't comprehend it. But I can show it to you if you let me, if you join us – and believe me, it is _glorious_."

"Florio, you're sick, they've brainwashed you... I don't know. Just let me help you – it's not too late. It – it can't be too late." The mage was stammering now, shaking his head in frantic denial.

A wheezing, gurgling noise came out of Monza's mouth, causing several of his audience to stare at him in confusion before they realised it was laughter. "You don't get it, do you? You're alone, Chrono. Alone in the cold and dark, and the monsters are at your door. You can't help me. You can't help anyone. I can help you, though. I can help your family, your friends... everyone. All you have to do is surrender. That's it. I did it – you can too."

Harlaown seemed to collapse while standing up, every part of him sagging inwards. "You're right, aren't you, Monza? I can't win."

"That's the spirit!" the lieutenant said reassuringly. "See, ma'am? I told you I could- ma'am?"

Rong-Arya was staring at her command throne's projectors, her face ashen. "Say again, brother-captain. I... I didn't catch you the first time."

_The ship's empty, ma'am! It's just us, the turrets, and Harlaown! We checked the security cams, the bio-sensors, everything – there's nobody else on board!_

In that instant, the daemonhost noted two things. First, that a light cruiser had spent an awfully long time near Harlaown's ship despite minimal apparent gain, and had received an unusual degree of protection from somebody at the end of their metaphysical tether. Second, that both the _Conqueror_ and the _Virulence_ were well within two hundred kilometres of a TSAB heavy cruiser.

"Damn it, Typhraxis, shut down the weapon controls! Do it _now_!"

_We can't, ma'am! The system's locked us out! Oh gods oh gods oh gods..._

"Then get to the bridge, you idiot! I don't _care_ about the casualties – _kill that son of a bitch_!" She was yelling at the top of her voice, sweat pouring off her forehead. "Macmillan, pull out! Helm, fire the retros! Abort the mission! ABORT THE FUCKING MISSION!"

On the screen, Harlaown was smiling, the terror and defeat gone from his face in an instant. "Well, I guess the rest of the fleet should be safe by now. Thanks for clumping everyone so close together, by the way – I appreciate it."

The image zoomed out, showing the bridge crew his hands – and, more importantly, what they were holding. One was placed on the glowing hemisphere of a Magical Interface System control crystal. The other held a small plastic key, jammed into a bright red box – the firing system for an Arc-en-ciel. The crystal flared, and the blue deflector shield appeared once more around HC-1, the Bureau flagship _Claudia_, brushing aside the Chaos warships' desperate attacks.

"Your information wasn't entirely accurate, captain," he continued, his body shaking as magical feedback ravaged it from the inside. "My father was not killed by boarders, or some other external force. He evacuated every one of his crew from his ship, and then he personally arranged its destruction – and yes, I hated him for it. I hated him for years, and I can only hope that my own children end up being a little more understanding than I was. Even if they aren't though, I would sooner die a _thousand_ deaths than deliver them into your hands. Oh, and Florio?"

"Yes, admiral?" Monza asked.

"Sorry I couldn't save you too."

Admiral Chrono Harlaown turned the key, sending unfathomable energies surging into the _Claudia_'s ruined focusing array. In the nanoseconds before it exploded, Rong-Arya belatedly wondered if there were some things about sacrifice that she did not understand after all.

* * *

The daemonhost rubbed her eyes instinctually as the light faded, only to yelp in pain a second later as she scorched her hands. _On the plus side, that means I still _have_ hands – and, presumably, arms. I was worried about that for a moment._

"Commander, how badly were we hit?"

"The entire front two klicks of the ship're gone," Ichiro-Faust replied glumly. "No retros, and most of our weapons and manoeuvring thrusters are out, too. To be honest, we're lucky it wasn't worse."

_Shit_. "And the _Virulence_?"

He just shook his head. "It was closer than we were."

"Well, at least we're still alive," she said with forced cheer, absently running her claws through Cassandra's hair. "Fire up the distress beacon, check the breached sectors for survivors, and- _what_ is that idiot doing now?"

Monza was laughing again, his head tilted back and his horrible pseudo-mouth yawning wide, as he spread his arms as if to embrace the distant stars. The curious thing, Rong-Arya noticed, was that once you got past the rather significant obstacle of the man's mutated larynx, it wasn't even a particularly insane laugh – just the pleasant, delighted chuckle of someone who'd finally figured out the punchline to a rather good joke.

"What's so funny, lieutenant?" she asked, exasperated.

_I've been dreaming for the past few weeks, you know that?_ he said inside her head, not bothering to use his real voice. _Such wonderful dreams – they let me see things I could never have imagined, let me escape to places that defied belief. I've enjoyed our journey, captain, and not just because of your hair. There's one thing about dreams, though. One very important thing._

"And that would be?"

_Eventually, you have to wake up._

She only saw it as a flicker of movement at first – a massive panel of ceramite armour, ripped from the _Conqueror_'s hull by the explosion. It was headed straight towards the bridge, moving faster and faster as a faint magical aura pulled it along.

Florio Monza was still laughing as Rong-Arya emptied an entire clip from her bolt pistol into him.

She vaulted off her throne, carrying her protesting daughter under one arm as she sprinted for the main elevator. "GET OFF THE BRIDGE! NOW!"

The next few seconds were a mad, blurred rush, more a series of static images than anything else. She saw tech-priests desperately trying to extricate themselves from their stations, their mechadendrites hopelessly entangled in the machinery. She saw Ichiro-Faust, bellowing and red-faced, marshalling the panicked crew into carefully-planned exit routes. She saw men, women, and indeterminates trip and fall, their comrades stampeding over them as their doom crept ever-closer. She saw herself, as if from a distance, shoving Cassandra into a maintenance worker's waiting tentacles and leaping out of the elevator, grabbing her idiot of an executive officer, and dragging him back inside with her just before the door slammed shut. Then, there was cramped, oppressive silence, broken only by the rumble of the elevator and the distant crash as Monza's final gift obliterated the _Conqueror_'s bridge.

The maintenance tech wordlessly handed her daughter back, and she clung onto the girl as if she were a lifebelt in a storm.

Whenever they had raided a world in the Alpha Quadrant, all the prisoners had been treated the same way regardless of their prior stations. They had been left in the cargo hold, exposed to infinitely-looping propaganda videos carefully selected to break their wills, and given food and water tainted with the Warp. By the time they reached their home-base at the New Syracuse colony, some prisoners would be dead, others would be insane, and most would be mutated.

Once they were planetside, the ones who were still alive would be separated from their families and branded with serial numbers, denoting them as members of one of the many work-gangs dedicated to expanding the colony and serving its inhabitants. Those who could not accomplish this to their masters' standards, whether due to age, infirmity, or simple incompetence, would be dragged away by the colony's medical staff in order to be modified for greater efficiency at their allotted task... and nobody who had seen the results of those shadowy figures' handiwork would consider that to be a reward in any way.

The one way to escape this was to offer oneself to the _Stiletto_'s sorcery cadre and ask them to assess your worthiness as a disciple of the gods. True believers had runes carved into their foreheads at grand, public ceremonies that celebrated their rebirth as children of Chaos, granted all the rights and privileges of full citizens – which were not terribly extensive, but at least they weren't slaves any more. Those who approached the psykers with deceit in their hearts, though, whether to better themselves or just to make the hurting stop, also had their fates made public... and for some reason, there tended to be a lot more of them. Eventually, most captives would quietly resign themselves to being slowly worked to death, letting the chosen ones recreate the luxuries that had been granted to them by divine benevolence on their long-distant homeworld.

That was the fate of the ordinary citizenry, the unthinking sheep who had let the Alpha Quadrant's injustices persist through their own fear and indolence. The Bureau, though... they were different. They had blasphemed against the gods, murdered her people, and rejected her message of redemption on a scale hitherto unprecedented.

For them... she would have to think up something a little more imaginative.

Cassandra whimpered as her mother's claws dug into her back reflexively. Rong-Arya didn't notice.

* * *

Jaghal Nine was simply one of the dozens of Bureau listening-posts dotted across the edge of Wild Space, and far from the only one to be up-gunned and expanded to serve as a staging point for the war effort. In fact, it was, if anything, one of the quieter ones, which was why it was such a surprise when the station's sensors detected a trio of battered, scarred warships approaching it through dimensional space.

"Incoming ships, state your identity and purpose," the local commander ordered blearily, trying to sound authoritative as the caffeine slowly kicked in.

"This is Rear Admiral Camargue, commander of the heavy cruiser _Indomitable_ and former commander of the Bloodhaven front," replied the voice from the speakers, sounding, if anything, even more exhausted than his own. "We request repairs, resupply, and use of your station's communications systems."

The station chief sat up a little straighter, his tiredness forgotten. "Of course, sir. Who do you want to send a message to?"

"_Two_ messages, captain. A formal report to Naval Command, and... and a private line, to one Amy Harlaown. Her husband is... on patrol."

Though the words were spoken softly, they echoed through the listening post's command centre as if he had shouted. None of its personnel knew Admiral Harlaown personally – with the limited media available aboard Jaghal Nine, only a rare few even knew what he looked like. Even so, there were some traditions that were older than the Bureau, older even than space travel itself.

As one, every soul present stopped their work and bowed their heads. For a moment, there was silence... and then life, as it was wont to do, carried on, if perhaps a little more quietly than before.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** 'On patrol' is a real-world euphemism, used by the US Submarine Corps (among others) to refer to missing/dead personnel whose bodies have not been recovered. A slight departure from the TSAB's usual, more British, military inspiration, and a bit anachronistic in-context, but they're more than multicultural (and multiplanetary) enough for it to be acceptable, I'd say.

Though the fact that we're starting to head towards exam season may present some delays, rest assured that I shall attempt to post the next update as soon as possible. Join me then, as we enter the calm before the storm...


	41. Talking Shop

**40. Talking Shop**

Of the three military branches of the Time-Space Administration Bureau, the Navy had changed the least since the days of the Sankt Kaiser and the Belkan Empire. Whilst the Army and Air Force had undergone dozens of reforms, gradually turning them more into police than soldiers as non-lethal combat tactics became more and more prevalent, the men and women who crewed the Bureau's mighty spacecraft had stuck to what they were good at – namely, making enemy ships explode and preventing their own from doing the same thing.

As the centuries went by, it was inevitable that traditions would emerge, legends would be made, and dynasties would form. Whilst the countless legions of the Harlaowns were undoubtedly the most numerous, there were quite a few families that were both older and considerably grander... such as the Thundras.

Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra's ancestors had often had their hands in both civilian and military space travel, and more than a few of them had profited greatly from shrewd investments made in various trading deals. The most obvious evidence of this was the Thundra estate on Mid-Childa, a sprawling, beautifully-landscaped collection of ornamental gardens around a house that blurred the definitions between 'mansion' and 'palace'. The family home was lined with portraits of heroic family members in various media (though they'd had to disable the sound on Uncle Magotan's hologram after one childish reprogramming too many), as well as the hundreds of souvenirs they'd brought back from their exploits.

Sagitar had turned it into a luxury apartment building at the earliest opportunity.

It wasn't just because even a fleet admiral needed some extra income, or because the estate, lovely as it was, was right in the middle of nowhere. He had never married, and the fact remained that after his aunt had died, his sister had moved off-planet, and his brother had eloped with the hermaphroditic linguini-waitress from Fedikia, Thundra House had been a little too large and empty for even someone as habitually misanthropic as him.

As things stood, he had two homes – his quarters in the central office, which had mostly survived the invasion, and his office in Naval Command, a quiet little place some distance from the hubbub of the main floor where he did most of his work. He had converted the latter into quite a tidy pseudo-apartment, a good place to grab a few moments of peace during a particularly hectic day, or shack up in when he had extended business on the surface. The funny thing was that in that part of town, a room a quarter of the size would have been both obscenely expensive and near-impossible to obtain. Government work had its advantages.

Or, at least, it had until some bright spark had decided to leak his office's location to the rest of the Bureau.

The heavily-built officer leaned forward on his sofa/desk, projecting an aura of raw, irritated alpha-maleness that was only slightly hindered by his floral-print pyjamas and fluffy slippers. On the plus side, the person on the other side looked almost as uncomfortable as he felt.

"Mr. Fleetwood," he said slowly, his voice taking on the (entirely appropriate) tone of a bear woken up halfway through hibernation, "get out of my office before I _throw_ you out."

The Member of Parliament blanched, waving his hands in protest. "Thundra, please be reasonable here. Most of the government – of _our_ leadership – is gone, and the NCP is gaining ground on all fronts. A power struggle's the last thing we need in the middle of a crisis like this, and the public support of Operation Guardian's commander would help us enor-"

"The ambitions of the National Conservative Party aren't my problem, Fleetwood. Was one of your lot's electoral promises less military intervention in civilian politics, or was getting crucified over that Varduk Prime article a figment of my imagination? Because I can't see how I could hallucinate that I was smeared over _five front pages and three fucking days of news_, but there you go."

"Yes, and we do apologise for-"

There was a long, complicated mechanical sound, and the politician suddenly found himself looking straight at the business end of a huge, black-and-gold crossbow. Seemingly dozens of metres away, a single, bloodshot eye gazed at him impassively through the sights.

"Thirty seconds."

"This-"

"Twenty-nine."

"But I-"

"Twenty-eight."

Fleetwood bolted.

Thundra waited until his panicked footsteps had faded into the distance before pulling the trigger on his arbalest, blasting a shallow crater in the wall and filling the corridor outside with glittering shrapnel and indigo fire. It was astonishingly cathartic.

"Gosh, I know people complain about the wallpaper here, but I didn't realise you felt _that_ strongly about it."

Lindy Harlaown strolled through the open doorway, dispelling her faint, diaphanous shield with a flick of her wrist. She was dressed in black mourning clothes, and there were signs of runny mascara around her eyes, but she nevertheless managed to favour him with a dazzling smile.

The current head of the Harlaown clan was well past forty, but didn't look a day older than twenty-five. Though she had clearly been the recipient of some measure of cosmetic surgery – the cluster of four blue opal bindis implanted into her forehead were more than enough evidence of that, as was her long, turquoise hair – Thundra doubted that that was the reason for it. Some women simply possessed a timeless beauty, and Lindy was one of them.

"Afternoon, professor. Good to see you're as polite as ever to our employers."

The fleet admiral grunted, telekinetically dragging an armchair over to his desk with a sweep of his arm. "Academy was a long time ago, Harlaown. You can stop calling me that now."

Her eyes sparkled as she sat down. "'Professor', or 'polite'?"

"... Yes. So what brings you here?"

She held up a detached epaulette, bearing the exact same rank symbols as the ones on his own uniform.

"Oh, bloody hell," Thundra growled. "Tell me that's not what I think it is."

Lindy – or, more accurately, Fleet Admiral Harlaown – sighed. "I'm afraid so. Rejoice, professor, for Operation Guardian has a new joint commander. I managed to get myself negotiated down to an advisory role, but... well, you see how it is."

"I do indeed. So how did I end up screwing up badly enough to need my hand being held? I thought the shitstorm from the invasion had passed over by now." His tone was light and ironic, but didn't quite manage to disguise the hurt and outrage he felt. _This is _my _command, damn it._

She leaned back to give him space, her expression full of gentle understanding, and he reflected, not for the first time, on what an extraordinarily lucky man the late Clyde Harlaown had been. "You'd think that, wouldn't you? Turns out that it just keeps hitting us from different directions. Put simply, you're a political liability."

"Really?" Thundra perked up, wiping an imaginary tear from his cheek. "My word. It's... it's everything I dreamed of and more. And how did I finally achieve this... exalted status?"

Lindy emitted a decidedly unladylike snort. "Curiously enough, the government seems to believe that you harbour some rather conservative attitudes."

"Oh? On what grounds?"

"The drunken rant you made against the Chief Administrator at last year's Naval Dinner. Your repeated, disparaging remarks against our various ethnic minorities, in particular, Mid-Childa's small Earthborn population. Your commentary on the Varduk Prime cleanup operation entitled 'Why I'm Voting for the National Conservative Party'. I doubt that the fact that you shot at a promising young Member of Parliament with an exploding crossbow bolt will win you many friends on that side of the aisle, either."

"But I waited until he was out of range!" Thundra protested weakly, before immediately shutting up as the younger fleet admiral fixed him with a look usually reserved for when one's young toddler had smeared something sticky and unpleasant all over the ceiling.

"That's why Fleetwood came to see you," Lindy continued. "The NCP has been recasting you as a champion for their cause. You can see it already, can't you? A noble old warrior, unafraid to speak his mind, defending the Bureau's traditions against the alien menace threatening us all. Bloodhaven's set to be a propaganda coup for them, and the Progressives want to mitigate it as best they can. That means either getting you on their side, or bringing in someone more sympathetic to them so they can get to share the acclaim."

He swore. "And this is why I don't read the news any more. So what's in it for you? I mean, I'd _like_ to believe that you volunteered for the pleasure of my sparkling conversation, but..."

"Sadly, you're right. The NCP may be going up in the world, but they still haven't fully recovered from picking the wrong side when the Scaglietti Incident went public, and they need all the allies they can get. They've been making promises to everyone with a grudge against the Progressives and the current administration – the Belkan Independence Front, the Family Council... and the Humanist League."

Thundra's bushy eyebrows rose. That was the closest thing he'd ever heard to pure vitriol from her, even counting the business with the overly handsy maths teacher in the third year.

"That last one's new to me," he said, discreetly closing the pop-up dictionary in his Device's HUD. "I take it that they aren't all about promoting a moral and philosophical theory primarily concerned with self-realisation through secular rationality?"

This smile was razor-thin, and entirely devoid of her usual warmth. "Not exactly. Have you seen the new legislation the NCP wants to level against 'artificials'? I'm not joking – that's the term they use in the documents. It's supposed to impose controls on the ones who are partially or entirely built for combat... and according to the criteria, Fate qualifies. So do a good number of her friends. This war has already taken one of my children from me, Sagitar. I'd prefer if it didn't result in my daughter being reduced to a second-class citizen as well."

Her eyes gleamed wetly, an errant drop splashing onto the table as her mascara was further ruined. _Smooth, Thundra. Real smooth._

"Is this going to be a problem, Harlaown?" he asked bluntly.

She straightened and wiped her eyes, leaving a faint, dark smear across both her cheek and her sleeve. "No. No, it isn't. This is one of the largest military operations in Bureau history. I'd prefer to think that I'm professional enough not to turn something like that into my personal quest for revenge."

Thundra simply nodded, completely out of his depth in any situation requiring tact. _Think, man. What would Wilson do?_ He dismissed half-a-dozen possibilities involving tea, crumpets, and carefully-folded socks, before reaching into a desk-drawer, retrieving a crumpled mass of white silk, and thrusting it in the other fleet admiral's general direction.

"Handkerchief," he muttered, by way of explanation.

Lindy took the proffered object delicately, and commenced wiping. "Thank you."

"He was a good kid," Thundra ventured gruffly, taking tentative steps across the treacherous ice-sheets of social nicety. "Brave. Smart. Deserved those stars on his shoulders."

There was nothing but raw pain on her face, and he looked away, silently cursing himself once more. "He did. He really did."

"Well," he said over-loudly, changing the subject as if the last couple of minutes had not happened, "I can't say they sent you over at the best time. We're almost ready to set sail, but there've been a few... complications. Again."

Lindy noisily blew her nose, raising a hand in silent apology. "Such as?"

"State-sponsored terrorism, for a start."

She stared at him. "You're kidding."

"I never kid about terrorism. Well, except for that article on Varduk Prime, but that was an isolated incident, I'd had a bit too much to drink at the time, I thought I'd posted it anonymously... I'd prefer not to talk about it. Anyway, the Alpha Quadrant's been doing what it does best – namely, hitting itself repeatedly over the head. There were a series of attacks across Federation, Klingon, and Aldebaran Alliance space two days ago – mostly crude but effective bombings, highly coordinated, and targeting both infrastructure and VIPs. Needless to say, they didn't take it well."

The grief was gone from her expression, shunted aside as the keen analytical mind of Fleet Admiral Harlaown took over. "Those targets – strategic, or symbolic?"

"A bit of both – we think they were trying to mask their intentions by hitting non-essentials. Among the more significant ones, they took out five shipping magnates, four Starfleet admirals, two starbases, this major Klingon holy site called the Temple of Boreth, Aldebaran's primary spaceport, half a dozen Federation Councillors, none ideologically aligned with each other, including the Betazoid representative... and Chancellor Gowron of the Klingon High Council."

"Kaiser's _blood_..." Lindy breathed. "I thought you were calling this terrorism, not a full-scale military assault."

"I was. It's those antimatter warheads of theirs. Ever since the Federation started decommissioning their photon torpedoes to be replaced with quantums, everyone and their pet tribble've been able to get their hands on some surplus from some source or another. This strike's big, but hardly unique."

"Tribble?"

"Don't ask." Thundra let out a rumbling sigh. "On the one hand, the Empire managed to get a replacement head of state quickly enough. Chancellor Martok, by all accounts, is far more stable, reasonable, and politically-aligned with the Bureau than his predecessor. On the other..."

"... there are going to be questions raised about how one of Gowron's apparent political rivals managed to seize power so smoothly," she finished for him. "You said this was state-sponsored. I'm presuming the new boy's innocent?"

"Near as we can tell. At least, he wasn't the prime mover. Some of the folks in Intel suggested Gowron's death was a copycat, an attack of opportunity, but that got shot down pretty quickly. Too well-planned, and the pattern was all wrong for an imitator at short notice."

"So who was it?"

"Took a while to figure that out, from what I hear. Our investigators were working with the affected nations – always a good idea to rack up some goodwill points with your new allies – and found this complete and utter maze of different players. Dozens of groups were claiming responsibility or had evidence leading to them, and each had their own motive. We think the perps were trying to fake something like a 'stand-alone/complex event' – or, at least, that's what Intel thinks. Not my field. Ever heard of one of those? Jargon that flies over my head makes my teeth itch."

"It's a bit like mass hysteria," Lindy explained. "Basically, lots of individual actors decide to do similar things at once, like copycats without an origin, creating the illusion of an organised conspiracy. I'd presume the trigger for this instance would be Picard's speech in the Federation Council Chamber, creating a backlash of panic, resentment, confusion, and fanatical support that feeds on itself, growing larger and larger. Eventually, rumours of armed conflict between the bickering factions begin, of calculated violence to make a political point. It's difficult to fact-check things happening half a galaxy away, and as the rumours spread, fiction becomes reality, hundreds of imitators, bandwagon-jumpers, and opportunists cooking off at the same time. At the very least, it would explain the wildly disparate targets; every attack had a different motive."

She smiled at Thundra's stunned expression. "My daughter-in-law _is_ former Intelligence, after all. You pick things up. Except, of course, that that's not how things played out in the Alpha Quadrant. Those attackers didn't move of their own accord – somebody set them off. Someone with considerable intelligence resources and an axe to grind against all three nations."

"The Cardassian Union," they both chorused in perfect unison, before glancing at each other in surprise and embarrassment.

"How did you find out in the end?" Lindy asked, once the awkwardness had died away.

"Remember I said most of the bombs were past their sell-by date? The antimatter in some of them had completely decayed, and our agents were able to recover and analyse them. Turned out that quite a few were of an old Cardassian military design – just an indicator, since it used to be a popular brand for paramilitary work, but it pointed us in the right direction. We doubled back on our investigations, and with a little application here and there of that good old Bureau magic, we started to find that more and more of the groups involved in the attacks had ties to Cardassian interests. Some were only tangential, and others were hidden behind dozens of front organisations, but taken as a whole..."

She nodded. "I see."

"It's quite obvious what they were trying to accomplish, of course," Thundra continued airily. "Picard's presentation was creepy enough from our perspective – just imagine what it must have been like at their tech-level, especially for a bunch of paranoid military-nuts. The attacks were designed to paralyse those three nations with internal strife, so that the Cardassians could cripple them before they managed to properly deploy their new superweapons. Unfortunately for them, they didn't count on us finding out the truth so quickly. Or, at least, that's what I think."

Technically, it wasn't so much what he thought as what his Intelligence staff thought, but he saw no reason to mention this. After the lecture on seated suplex events or whatever, he was damned if he was going to let himself be shown up again by a former student two-thirds his age.

Lindy's forehead creased. "That's... logical, I suppose. Even so, it doesn't explain how they managed to come up with something like that just a few days after the broadcast. I mean, not to disparage your efforts, professor – quite the opposite – but look at how long it's taken you and your staff to get Operation Guardian pointed in the right direction."

The old officer was suddenly very glad that he'd bothered to read the Intelligence write-up in detail. There was a certain cosmic injustice, he felt, in being forced to do revision in order to keep up with one of your protégés.

"Again, they panicked," he replied. "Odds are that most of their agents were in place a long time ago, tailored for all sorts of different missions. They just decided to set them all off at once."

"Fair enough. So how've our allies reacted... or do I not want to know?"

"Truth be told, you probably don't. Our diplomats have been doing the best they can, but the Klingons especially are out for blood. More so than usual, I mean. Apart from anything else, Martok likely wants to remove all remaining suspicion about the last chancellor's death, and there aren't many better ways to do that than obliterating the folks really responsible. Best-case scenario, the resource drain from the extra patrols on their borders is going to cut their contribution to the Bloodhaven offensive in half. Worst-case?" He smiled grimly. "Those wonderful new Spiral Drivers our labcoats handed over are going to be used to pound an interstellar civilisation into dust."

The aforementioned protégé paled. "You're right. I didn't. Anything else popped up over there, or is that the worst of it?"

"Wouldn't that be nice?" Thundra growled. "It isn't just _their_ patrols that are causing problems – turns out some of our own ships have gone missing, too. Five squadrons, all deployed in or around the Alpha Quadrant. I checked with some of the people running the show around there, and they said that they'd been reassigned to a special mission with omega-level security clearance. Kaiser's blood, Harlaown, some of that stuff's out of _my_ league."

"Did you get the mission category, at least?"

"Yep. 'Artefact retrieval'."

They shared a significant (and mutually unsettled) glance. One of the Bureau's highest duties was the capture and containment of dangerous magical artefacts – so much so, in fact, that captains assigned to such missions were effectively given carte blanche to act as they saw fit. Ever since the then-admiral Lindy Harlaown had helped disguise the effort to capture Jail Scaglietti behind the front of 'Artefact Retrieval Section Six', the category had been used as informal military code to describe any similarly unrestricted operation. Judging by her expression, she was quite aware of the irony.

Her mouth worked soundlessly. There was no curse her sense of decency would permit that adequately described the situation.

Thundra leaned back, a bitter smile on his face. "So, in conclusion, the broadcast we sponsored triggered a terrorist uprising, the nations we gave superweapons to are _thiiis_ far from committing genocide, and several of our people are running around doing Kaiser-knows-what with enough firepower to crack open a planet or two. Other than that, our foreign policy in that neck of the woods seems to be doing absolutely fine. How about you? Anything else to add to the pile?"

The turquoise-haired woman shuffled awkwardly in her armchair, causing the ancient piece of furniture to squeak its feeble protest. "Well, it's not to do with the Alpha Quadrant, thank goodness, but there was something."

"Go on."

"I had a chat with someone in the waiting-room on the way in. Nice girl, recently got engaged. Apparently, she's a goddess from another dimension who wants to report a missing-person case."

As the nominal head of Operation Guardian, Thundra had long since ceased questioning the bizarre events that the universe seemed to adore throwing in his face so much. He simply sighed, and pulled a notepad out of one desk-drawer... and a bottle of hard liquor out of another.

"Isn't that a little outside our jurisdiction?" he asked, after taking a few calming swigs.

"Less than you might think," Lindy replied, politely waving away the bottle as he offered it to her. "Apparently, she was last seen falling into a hole in the space-time continuum whilst chasing after a – and I quote – 'skeevy Nordic fisherman' who had earlier given our deific ambassador some rather good dating tips. According to our testimony, said fisherman was an agent of Chaos. A daemon, specifically."

"Oh? They do slavery, pan-universal conquest, _and_ relationship lessons? And here I was thinking that the transcripts from that assassin we captured were an isolated incident. Did you get this lady's home address? Be good to see how far they've spread, if nothing else."

"I wouldn't call this a reliable indicator, to be honest. Her universe is pretty much on the other side of Bureau territory, and it was fairly clear from what she said that this chap had taken a wrong turn and was far from home. Still, it might be a good idea to send a ship or two in that direction, if only because it'd be nice to have some gods actually owing us favours rather than wanting to do unspeakable things to us. Think of it as a long-term investment."

"Provided, of course, that it goes better than our _other_ interventions so far," Thundra replied drily. "I swear, if I see another universe hooked on lethal alien artefacts, drowned in political turmoil, or jumped on by insane abominations operating off guilt-by-association, I'm going to head over to the Diplomatic Corps's offices and start administering crossbow-based suppositories. Still, I'll admit that a daemon running loose is not the sort of thing we want to encourage at the moment. Think I'll place this one in your court, Harlaown – you've run this sort of operation before, and my diplomatese is rusty. Barely know how to order those tasty sandwiches with the cheese and cucumber anymore."

Lindy saluted, a twinkle in her eye. "Roger that, professor. Before we catch up with our runaway, want to place an advance order for advice on your love-life?"

It was Thundra's grave misfortune that he was having another drink when he heard that.

* * *

Eventually, they managed to clear most of the alcohol from the walls, and almost all of it from the fabric and paperwork-related parts of the bed/desk. At the very least, Lindy had said that she couldn't spot the difference... which, on closer reflection, was probably a thinly-veiled reference to the natural state of his office. She was the driest of them, thanks to a hastily-raised shield, which was why Thundra had her uniform jacket draped over his shoulders like a bull wearing a napkin. He wasn't entirely sure how this was supposed to help, and the colour clashed horribly with his pyjamas, but it was the thought that counted. Besides, it had been his own silly fault for spilling a five-dimensional bottle indoors. _Scratch that – it was my own silly fault for buying a five-dimensional bottle. Note to self: next time, make your purchases from the distillery _before _you sample their products._

"What about the Bloodhaven front?" the jacket's donor asked, apparently taking her own turn at changing the subject to paper over an awkward moment. _Cosmic injustice, I tell you._

"The Bloodhaven front? It's several hundred light-years of contested space. You'll have to specify a little."

"What was the fallout from my son's death?"

She was looking straight at him, her eyes like chips of ice. _Kaiser's blood, I walked right into that one, didn't I? So much for getting rid of the awkwardness..._

He paused a moment, waiting for his whisky-addled brain to restart. "Less than you might think, actually. The data leak that resulted in his and Camargue's changeover getting jumped doesn't seem to have given away much else about our operations around there, and since the latter was still in the vicinity at the time, we managed to patch up the leadership gap before they could properly exploit it. Camargue's taking it pretty badly – by the time we reinstated him, he was all but falling on his sword. Literally."

A slight quirk of Lindy's eyebrows was all the reaction she gave to this news.

"It's a big sword," Thundra added.

The State of Harlaown remained a zero-sympathy zone.

"Look, I'll realise that he's not exactly the first choice for the command – wouldn't have organised the changeover otherwise – but it's only a temporary measure until we launch the invasion proper. Besides, he's been doing a pretty good job at keeping Chaos patrols from slipping through our lines so far, which is really all we need at the moment."

"Not good enough."

There was a flat, deadened calmness to his student's voice that made his hand reach unconsciously for the pocket-watch that was his Device's storage mode, and made him wonder once more why that maths teacher had one day decided to seek employment elsewhere. Sanity prevailed, though, and for the second time that day, Sagitar Thundra also managed the extraordinary feat of keeping his mouth closed rather than digging himself in deeper.

_Well, she's going to find out sooner or later. Might as well be on my terms._ "One thing we did get out of the ambush, though, was the identity of the enemy's current fleet commander. Apparently, she went to oversee the operation personally."

Lindy smiled sweetly, in the exact same manner she had when they had met to discuss her grades back at the Academy... and with the exact same (devastating) level of effectiveness. "I'm listening."

"It's no less than the former captain of the _Stiletto_, a lady called Rong-Arya. We cross-referenced the comm-intercepts we picked up from the battle with voice-clips from the Year of Chaos, and got a positive ID."

"Oh?"

"Rong-Arya is, in the simplest terms, the woman who provoked the war. At the very least, she's responsible for a good number of the war crimes that led up to it. She's wanted in at least three universes by at least sixteen different interstellar law-enforcement agencies, including our own, and her capture would serve as both an invaluable symbolic victory and another bargaining chip with which to improve our shaky relations with the Alpha Quadrant's denizens. In short, we want her alive and in a fit state to stand trial, not sacrificed on the altar of somebody's grudge." Thundra shot his new joint commander a meaningful look. "Not that I'm implying anything."

Her smile merely broadened, becoming something decidedly predatory. "Race you."

He should have chewed her out. Open defiance on their very first day working together was nothing but a sign of instability to come, a liability in battlefield conditions. For it to happen regarding such a politically-sensitive manner, or be so clearly motivated by emotion rather than reason, was even less forgivable. Instead, he felt his lips curling upwards, matching her grin with his own. Lindy had not been the only Harlaown he'd taught, after all, not the only one whose award ceremonies he'd watched on his monitor, nodding in quiet approval all the way.

"You're on."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Ayup, that's right, folks – after half a year of busted computers, university complications, nervous breakdowns, and... _the Morocco incident_, the Doorstop is making its triumphant return!

Apologies for the mixed-up formatting on other chapters – has apparently decided it hates me and wishes for my eternal unhappiness, so I've been experimenting with various ways to bring scene-breaks back in. Hopefully, I'll be able to sort out a consistent system eventually.

Now, all that remains is to upload the other chapters and answer the reviews all you lovely people posted in my absence. Here goes nothing...


	42. Coping Mechanisms

_**41. Coping Mechanisms**_

_So it was helpful, then?_ Chief Librarian Yuuno Scrya asked.

_Oh yes, very,_ Lindy Harlaown's voice replied cheerfully from the other end of the telepathic link. _My word, but you should have seen his face... I'm not quite sure I got the definition right on that reclining multiplex stuff, though – mind clearing it up for me sometime?_

Within the blessed invisibility of his taxi seat, Yuuno pressed a palm to his forehead. _Certainly, ma'am. Will you be wanting 'Sociological Phenomena for Dummies', or the complete 'Ghost in the Shell' DVD collection?_

_Ghost in the...? Will that play on a holographic projector?_

_Much to the series creators' everlasting regret, I suspect not._

_Oh, well, I suppose I'll just go for... umm... that other one you mentioned. Thanks for the help, Yuuno, dear – I appreciate it. Show Hayate a good time, won't you?_

Yuuno sputtered incoherently for a moment, before giving up. _I... ah... of course, ma'am. Anything else you want assistance with, just give the word._

He cut the link, and leaned back in the seat, exhaling through his nose. After the news from the front lines, everyone in the new Fleet Admiral Harlaown's social network was only too happy to lend her a hand, even if that meant having the already-overworked senior archivist of a multidimensional civilisation supply her with crib notes so that she could show off to her former teacher. Despite the fact that he'd volunteered to help, though, the wanton misuse of meme theory always made him a little... twitchy.

The rain hammered down against the windows, turning the view outside into the kind of pointillist nightmare that Vincent van Gogh might have created if he had stolen a time-machine, gone on a drunken bender with H. R. Giger and Salvador Dali in Las Vegas, and managed to rattle off a few paintings before the inevitable blood-soaked ritual to conjure the forces of darkness/skip paying the bar tab. The massive skyscrapers of Clanagan's city centre curled overhead, bizarrely distorted by the curve of the glass and the pebbled, ephemeral mass of water droplets upon its surface. The street-lights blinked on and off along with the neon threads and holographic billboards that lined the taller buildings, their arrhythmic flickering almost matching the flashes of lightning overhead.

The metropolis's power-grid had not been in a good way ever since the invasion, and getting hit by one of Mid-Childa's infamous summer storms had not helped one bit. Neither, for that matter, had the string of catastrophic reactor breaches that had struck the district's power-plants, triggered by a sentient sleeper virus seeded weeks ago by an especially inventive Hellhound team. Casualties had been minimal, thankfully, but the incident had only served to heighten the city's paranoia... and Yuuno knew where that led.

He gazed into the night for a few moments more, trying to see if he could spot any remotely recognisable landmarks through the deluge, but found nothing. Judging by the length of the journey so far, though, they still had a little way to go, so he settled into the most comfortable meditation position his seatbelt would allow, closed his eyes, and accessed the net.

Global communication/information networks were extremely common on planets where one or more civilisations had developed beyond a certain point – in fact, some scholars (Yuuno included) were still debating whether or not they should be seen as developmental milestones in and of themselves. The regular electronic ones had a remarkable enough impact on society as was, but it was when magic was brought into the equation that things got really interesting.

The Mid-Childan network was not just mechanical, but telepathic, permitting the free, rapid dissemination of information at a rate and level never before seen. Yuuno rather doubted the transhumanists' claims that the entire population would be swept up in some kind of gigantic, hiveminded singularity – as Ancient Belka's fate had amply demonstrated, humans just didn't get along with each other that well – but he certainly looked forward to the time when every citizen on the planet, not just unique individuals like himself and Device-users with the appropriate add-ons, would be able to access encyclopaedic levels of information with a thought.

Of course, judging by the current state of the net, that information would probably consist primarily of malicious advertisements, derivative, poorly-written crossover fanfiction, and eye-wateringly bizarre pornography, but Yuuno preferred to ignore that little detail. Besides, there was some good, useful stuff lying around if one knew where to look... some of it even unrelated to those three categories.

A planet's worth of data poured into his mind, enough to snap an untrained psyche like a twig. To him, though, it was little more than a refreshing change of pace from interfacing with the Infinite Library. There was a vibrancy and vitality to a planet's collective consciousness that could not be found in the steady, ancient majesty of the vast pocket dimension that was his charge. The porn quota, though, was still about the same. Collections of everything ever written had their disadvantages, too, as the Library's nineteen sub-departments of obscene bathroom graffiti amply demonstrated.

Patterns began to slowly appear, drifting into view like the image of an old woman in an optical-illusion painting. Everywhere was a serious, dark-haired face, wearing the dignified, slightly constipated expression that he always adopted during an official photo-op. Yuuno flicked through the pictures, wondering which one of those identical, impassive expressions had been containing quiet amusement as a veritable tidal wave of little Harlaowns swamped their godfather off-camera and their mother laughed fit to burst. To this day, he had no idea where they'd hidden his old pair of glasses.

Chrono had been more than simply a highly capable ship commander – he had been a symbol, a living manifestation of the Bureau's values, its dynamism, and the opportunities it presented for its citizens. You too could become an admiral in your twenties, with an entire civilisation's worth of exotic toys at your fingertips as you explored the boundless reaches of the multiverse. You too could go toe-to-toe with mages whose power was akin to gods, defeating them with nothing more than wits and determination. You too could have a glamorous job, a wonderful family, everything anyone could ever want.

You too could stay behind amongst the drifting corpses of the people entrusted to you, desperately attempting to buy time for the scattered, fleeing survivors. You too could die alone in the emptiness of space, forced to choose between suicide and capture by insane, extradimensional monstrosities. You too could have your coffin lowered into the ground, empty because there wasn't anything left short of subatomic particles when an Arc-en-ciel detonated under you.

Though he tried to keep a reasonably optimistic attitude towards human nature, the librarian had to admit that when faced with the death of someone you'd never met, the standard reaction for most people was to feel a tad melancholic, perhaps contemplate one's own mortality, and then get on with the rest of your life. It was when you took away their symbols, their _aspirations_, that they really started to sit up, take notice, and break out the magically-enhanced coilguns.

A cluster of other familiar names flitted past his vision and he zoomed in on the pertinent story, cross-referencing it from over twenty different sources at once in order to make sure he had the facts completely straight. As he processed it, he couldn't help but let out a delighted chuckle. _So that's what she was talking about..._

For the past day or so, Chrono and Amy's homestead had been under siege as a small horde of reporters camped outside, demanding the grieving widow's take on the situation. Yuuno couldn't help but wonder what they expected to get beyond 'my husband's dead and I'm not happy about it', but then again, he wasn't a journalist.

Things had changed abruptly, though, when the three front-line captains of the First Expeditionary Force had teleported in, formed a cordon around the house, and politely waited for the swarm to go away. The reporters had resisted at first, but after Signum had become bored and started working through her weapons' practice drills – all of them – they had cleared out with commendable speed. Even if one discounted the whirling cuisinart of death that was her sword/whip/bow Device, Laevantien, there was something profoundly disconcerting about the graceful, scooping stab of a Kantian battlespoon expert.

For all of the Wolkenritter's theatrics, though (and yes, putting 'Signum' and 'theatrics' in the same sentence was something he had never expected to end up doing), it was quite obvious from the video-feeds who was in charge of the impromptu intervention. Even if it hadn't been, though, and even if he had not received the invite several hours before it happened, he would still have known.

Once, he had wondered on occasion why it was that he had ended up falling in love with that cheerful, enthusiastic girl with the auburn hair, who had taken him in when he was injured and nursed him back to health simply because he was there and needed help. As the years went by, though, the question became more whether there was any way in which he _couldn't_ have.

That was a familiar road, though, and one which he had no intention of walking today – or at any other time, for that matter. With an effort of will, he dragged himself away, immersing himself in the sea of information once more.

There was a certain timbre to the data, not just in the Harlaown reports, but permeating the network on every level. Anger, certainly, outrage at the injury dealt and a desire for retribution – _who do they think they are, monsters, murderers, wait until the fleet get their hands on them_ – but that was almost superficial, a manifestation of the group-mind's immune system as it reacted to the infection spreading through its veins. Fear.

The Bureau's image of its own invincibility was not a new thing, caused by a mere few decades of peace. Its ancestor-organisations had effectively left any meaningful opposition behind when they went interdimensional – even the fall of the Belkan Empire had been the result of internal strife rather than some terrible, encroaching Other. It had changed them, that long reign at the summit of the food-chain, secure in their untouchable arrogance. Warfare had become a child's game, laser-tag with siege weaponry... and why not? It wasn't as if magic inflicted lasting damage on anything but the scenery. _No harm done, dust yourself off, come back and have another go, and if you're still feeling homicidal, I'm sure that a good long chat with our doctors will leave you right as rain._ All very nice, all very civilised, and if the odd maniac didn't want to play by the rules... well, if they wanted to pick a fight with a planet-or-so's worth of walking artillery, that was their lookout. Jail Scaglietti got lonely sometimes, and would probably appreciate the neighbours in his orbital prison.

Unfortunately, Chaos hadn't received the memo.

After a scavenger-civilisation operating from a couple of star systems (at best) had wiped out a half-dozen colonies, partially demolished their capital, and caused billions of deaths in a single preliminary raid, it was safe to say that the myth of invincibility was in serious jeopardy. Even so, it could have been dismissed as a freak occurrence, hidden behind walls of denial with a few token scapegoats to take the fall, if it had not been for what followed.

The gods, as soon became apparent, understood fear. Most importantly, they understood that it would spread and take root best if nourished with regular reminders of what their victims _had_ to fear, and so it was that almost two months after the invasion, on the eve of the Bloodhaven offensive itself, nobody felt truly safe.

Clanagan had not fared as badly as some other places – it was not even the worst hit site on Mid-Childa, compared to the infested mines of Bel Toth or the glass-lined crater that had once been Keilenheim City. Nevertheless, it was a metropolis of twenty million souls and a billion hiding places, and Hellhound, assassin, and daemon alike had gleefully exploited this. Not a day had gone past without another souvenir, another silent message of 'CHAOS WAS HERE' written in blood across the city's streets.

The variety in method was extraordinary – everything from crude booby-traps and rogue cyborgs to killer meme-viruses, Manchurian agents reprogrammed through daemon-torture, and even stranger things. The recent power plant attack had been positively pedestrian, in fact, not even unique in its scale after that Keilenheim rescue team had stumbled across the antimatter bomb hidden in the evacuation shelters.

The invasion – if it could even be called that – had lasted two days. Conservative estimates were already measuring the cleanup and recovery time in decades, and as for the psychological scars... well, it certainly looked like therapists would be exempt from the glumly projected economic depression.

Perhaps the most disturbing stories were of the cultists, ordinary citizens who had seen things beyond their comprehension and reacted in the oldest, most instinctual way known to humanity. Though Yuuno preferred to leave the theological implications to his friends in the Belkan Saint Church, he was pretty sure that messy, ostentatious ritual sacrifices, whether fabricated by the rumour-mill or not, were not exactly the best way to foster community spirit in a nation on a war footing.

"Mr. Scrya, sir?" The taxi driver's soft Ruwellan burr cut through his thoughts. "We're almost here."

He pulled himself out of the network, feeling the sort of nauseating unease that he imagined a parent would feel when their child was crying out in pain and they had no idea why... as well as a tendency to wax poetic at inappropriate moments, which he chose to chalk up to the lit-crit site he'd discovered the triple axe-murder report on. For all his fondness for gigantic magical information repositories, the feedback effects could get... irritating.

Even so, that was far from the primary reason for his relief at returning to reality. The panic coursing through the network was cloying, overwhelming. Soon, people would be turning on each other over nothing more than the weight of a rumour, if they hadn't already. A decisive victory at Bloodhaven would no doubt help restore the Bureau's self-confidence, but if it went as badly as so many of their other engagements so far... _Except that that's not going to happen. Because of me. Because of what I've helped unleash on the multiverse. Yay, me._

Yuuno was good at not thinking about things. Harbouring a spectacularly hopeless crush for nearly fourteen years gave you plenty of practice in shunting unwelcome thoughts to the back of your mind. Even so, the things he'd seen in the Laveran system would likely require extra effort.

The taxi drew up to the kerb, splashing a small wave of rainwater across the pavement. Yuuno thanked the driver politely, making sure to tip him for the speedy journey, and then stepped out of the vehicle. The shield he'd summoned to keep the rain off wasn't in the way of the door, much to his relief – it had taken him quite a while to get that trick right without slicing off something expensive.

Unfortunately, he forgot to take the next logical step and levitate over the puddles – which was why, a minute later, he was crouched in the lobby of one of Clanagan's three most exclusive restaurants, discreetly attempting to wring what felt like an ocean's worth of moisture from the trouser-leg of his best (and only) formal suit. Needless to say, the receptionist's futile attempts to keep a straight face were _not_ helping.

The sad thing was that there had actually been a fairly logical series of decisions leading up to this point. It was always nice to get in touch with an old friend, especially if she and you had not had much time to chat lately. Likewise, if you had a great deal of disposable income due to a profitable job and frugal living habits, grabbing a ridiculously expensive bite to eat before being consigned to several days of shipboard rations (or worse, Shamal's cooking) was a reasonable measure to take in order to have some happy memories with which to preserve one's sanity. Finally, the White Dragon's dress-code meant that some measure of presentability on his part was pretty much mandatory.

It was around about when the Lieze twins had cornered him with a comb, military-grade cologne, three automated tailor-mechs, and twenty-one volumes on dating tips that he had first realised that he was no longer in control of the situation. To be more accurate, he had realised it shortly afterwards, when he had stopped being relieved that they hadn't presented him with the ritual knife, hotline to Naval Command, and copy of 'Hijacking Ancient Belkan Superweapons for Fun and Profit' that they usually tried to get him to lug around when Hayate was in town. Nanoha would have been proud.

As the eternally-smiling staff led him into the main dining area, he resolved to make the best of his predicament. After all, the Dragon had been specialising in Earthborn cuisine lately, and he'd always wanted to try the fabled Mongolian delicacy known as 'soss, egg, and chips'.

The White Dragon had once been one of Clanagan's oldest pubs, a rambling, smoky affair from before Belka's fall. Untouched by war, political strife, or health-and-safety regulations, it had gamely weathered the centuries until one day an especially brave entrepreneur from the Vaizen technocracy had noted its unrivalled city-centre location and decided to convert it into a flagship hypertech restaurant for the uber-snobbish, instantly halving its customers and doubling its profits. As for the persistent food poisoning cases... well, they didn't go away, exactly, but they certainly got a lot more interesting, as all three time-displaced versions of the food critic who'd first tried the blowfish could attest.

The dining area was just as artfully multidimensional as the rest of the new building, and thus difficult to describe without diagrams, advanced physics textbooks, and mild schizophrenia. It didn't bother Yuuno very much, compared to some of the Infinite Library's less stable departments, but he could still see why neatly folded brown paper bags had been discreetly placed next to most of the tables designed for human usage. The elaborate, abstract light-sculpture of the white dragon in the centre of the room was a nice touch, even if he couldn't tell whether it was placed above, below, beside, or around him. Possibly all four at once.

Colonel Hayate Yagami, commander of the First Expeditionary Force, decorated military heroine, and walking WMD alert, was already at the table they'd booked, wearing a little black dress that forced him to stare at _absolutely anything else_ until his jaw no longer threatened to detach itself from the rest of his head. Ludicrously purple imagery involving _creamy skin_, _delicate lace_, and _firm- oh Kaiser's blood I will not allow myself to finish that thought_ flooded his abused synapses once more, and he blinked his eyes, solemnly vowing to go after that thrice-accursed literature site with a red pen and flamethrower as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

He attempted a casual, friendly smile, hoping that it ended up as less of a horrible rictus than it felt like. "Evening, Hayate. Looks like your prep-crew got just as carried away as mine."

The combat mage started at his voice, her cheeks pinkening. "Oh. Um. Yuuno. Hi. Yes. Very carried away. Shamal always gets so enthusiastic about these things, I can't bear to say no. Heh. Heh heh."

She seemed to be expecting something. With a horrible sinking feeling, Yuuno realised exactly how rusty he was where this sort of thing was concerned... whatever 'this sort of thing' was.

"The dress looks... nice," he ventured as he sat down, the seat obligingly moulding itself to his hindquarters. "Very nice. It's your design, isn't it? I thought I recognised the shape of the hemline and the... erm... the other stuff." _Ooh, a conversation topic. Nicely manoeuvred, Scrya._ "So you're back to trying your hand at fashion, then? How's that working out?"

Hayate perked up. "Oh, you remembered! Gosh, I didn't think anyone was paying attention when I was going on about that – not that I'd blame them. Detailed discussions on fabric aren't up everyone's street. Still a hobby, I'm afraid – I try to aim for practical, not catwalk, and that's always more time-consuming. What with the war effort and everything... well, you see. Besides, I'm down one practice model ever since Signum started refusing to help after the... corsetry event. Matter of fact, this is one of the old ones I made for her – I shortened it a little, got rid of some of the decoratives, reduced the bust... a lot..."

She trailed off, the blush rising like a crimson dawn as she realised once more where she was and who she was talking to. Yuuno, for his part, kept a smile on his face and a tight lid on his imagination, whilst fervently resisting the urge to say anything. Particularly innocently-meant but easily-misconstrued comments about how one of his oldest friends might be underselling herself a little in the measurements department. Because he was not thinking about that. Not in the slightest.

"What about you then, Yuuno? What have you been up to?"

The change in subject only threw him a little, but it was still enough for some unwelcome memories to slip past his carefully-prepared mental barriers. He was back on the research station's observation deck, pleading into the comms for them to stop the experiment as the sickly purple glow began to creep over the _Astelan_'s hull. He was watching the logs from the doomed research ship, as the walls and instrument panels began to distort with the deceptive slowness of a lucid nightmare. He was... sitting in a rather nice (if flashy) restaurant, and Hayate was staring at him with her typically gentle concern.

"Oh... this and that. The Spiral Driver program at Laveran VI, mostly. To be honest, I'm almost looking forward to Bloodhaven – at least it'll be a change of scene." _Please don't ask me any more, please don't ask me any more, please don't ask me any more..._

The colonel, regrettably, did not get the message. "That bad, eh? You know, I heard some rumblings about that through the grapevine. Something about 'Code Indigo'. You know what that is?"

Yuuno sighed. Keeping unpleasant secrets from his friends was one thing, but keeping life-threatening ones from them was quite another.

"It's a new warning code pertaining to Spiral Drivers," he explained. "It describes a catastrophic emotional feedback surge caused by the psychological imbalances that are a known side-effect of overuse of the devices, resulting in the transformation of the Driver, its operator, and whatever vehicle is being used to transport it into what can only be described as an extremely powerful, mindlessly aggressive _abomination_. In layman's terms, Spiral Drivers drive their operators mad, and a Code Indigo is the physical manifestation of that madness. It's a phenomenon that's been appearing a lot in the Republic's universe, due to influence from this overarching, possibly-sentient psychic phenomenon they've got over there called the 'Force'. Casualties have been... significant." He studied her expression. "Yes, we're talking about the machines I helped create. No, I'm not happy about it. Next question?"

Hayate was wearing the Investigative Face, the very particular look that all Bureau officers developed eventually. He'd seen it before, during one of the interrogations in the aftermath of the Varduk Prime Massacre, and had prayed that it would never be directed at him. _Not my lucky day, is it?_

"Why Code Indigo?" she asked, her voice neutral.

"Because of the colour a Driver's aura turns when it starts going Anti-Spiral. Technically, it's more of a shade of lilac, but the research team wanted something that sounded more intimidating than Code Lilac, and Code Violet was already in use for exotic bio-weapon outbreaks. There was a lot of grumbling in the station over the fact that, and I quote, 'all the cool ones were taken'. They were especially miffed at you for the Book of Darkness Incident stealing Code Black."

The corners of his mouth curled up. It could technically have been classified as a smile.

"In retrospect, that probably should have been a warning sign."

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint them. You said it was mostly happening on the Republic front, but the rumours I've heard suggest it isn't limited to there. Is that true?"

"I'm afraid so. At first, we thought it was just the Force screwing with an otherwise-valid system – whilst there was plenty of evidence of pilot instability from both Mithril's and the Spiral Nation's files, most of that could be chalked up to the operators in question being crazy to begin with. The sanest Lambda Driver jockey we could find _blew up his own school_ on a regular basis, for the Kaiser's sake, and let's not even _try_ going into the nutjobs the Spirals decided to stick in their mechs."

"But you decided to make sure."

"Better safe than sorry, right? Our test-ship was the _Astelan_, this junky old destroyer on loan from the local naval base. We loaded it up with about a dozen Drivers, half the capacity for a ship that size, and started putting it through its paces in both realspace and the War- sorry, I mean dimensional space. It was in the latter where things started getting weird first. The crew started reporting hallucinations, and their biometrics readings were jumping around all over the place. After a few tries, it began to happen in realspace as well. I wanted to stop there, but I was overruled. Then the first symptoms of a Code Indigo started showing. I panicked. I threatened the supervisor, tried to pull the plug, to get the crew out of there... they were too far gone. The station batteries pounded the thing that came out of D-space until there was nothing left of it but memories. There were thirty-eight people on that ship. I heard every last one of them die."

Any change in Hayate's demeanour was masked by the constantly-changing lights and sounds of the dining area. "And then what happened?"

"They continued the tests. More, they _expanded_ them. Ships and crew started getting brought in from all over, mostly from the sorts of places that I doubt would stand up well to proper inspection. Some of the vessels were barely holding together, others still had pirate insignia and marks from small-arms fire. As for the living test-subjects... about half of them were wearing restraint-collars, and the other half didn't look like they had much choice in the matter either. The researchers, on the other hand – hah, sorry, I suppose I mean the _other_ researchers – they loved every minute of it. They kept poking and prodding, testing the Drivers to breaking point and beyond... and when a Driver breaks, it takes a whole lot of stuff with it. You want to know why I'm not there at the moment? Why I signed up for this mess of an invasion effort? Because I quit. I bailed. I'm a librarian, damn it, not Scaglietti's old lab-buddy."

"Did you report what was going on?"

"_Of course I bloody well did_! I kept going up the chain of command, and _every single time_ it was the same. 'Thank you for informing us of this, we appreciate your concern, now would you please be so good as to fuck off and die'. I would have taken it further, but... they started making threats. The sort of threats I couldn't exactly ignore." _The sort that wasn't just aimed at me._ "Hayate, I'm not so sure the Bureau managed to get everyone when we cleaned house three years ago. They're back, the body-count's rising, and _I have no idea what to do about it_."

There was no mistaking it now – Hayate's face was definitely starting to shade towards the greyish side. Yuuno winced, and put his head in his hands.

"... And there I go again, ruining a perfectly good evening by dumping my baggage all over it," he growled. "Seriously, that was... what? Thirty seconds until whingeing? A minute? That has to be a new record. Look, maybe this wasn't such a-"

The librarian was cut off abruptly by a small hand pressing on his shoulder and a pair of blue eyes boring into his skull.

"The First Expeditionary Force wishes to reiterate its continued support for the Infinite Library and its staff – in particular, regarding any internal matters that have come to their attention such as corruption, treason, and state-sponsored homicide. Furthermore, since there's not much we can do about it until the whole kerfuffle with Bloodhaven is sorted out, the commanding officer of the expeditionary force would like to forget about it for the moment and enjoy an all-too-infrequent meeting with an old and extremely valued friend." Hayate smiled. "Is that acceptable, Chief Librarian Scrya?"

Yuuno gave in, letting an answering smile slowly spread across his own face. It wasn't as if he had much motive to defend his position, anyway.

"I believe so, colonel, though we will have to scrutinise the relevant documentation first. So, anything on the menu that particularly grabs you?"

"Apart from the live Vaizenian centopus in the 'To Share' section, you mean? Well, there's the 'traditional Norwegian pizza', which is causing five years of geography lessons to cry out in protest, but _does_ look rather delicious..."

The librarian, meanwhile, was half-listening, and half noticing the particular way that her face lit up when discussing the topic of food. It was always nice to see people talking about the interests that were truly dear to them.

_Have a fun evening? Might not be so difficult after all._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** No, Lindy _didn't_ get the definition exactly right. I'll let you figure out how for yourselves.

One thing I noticed was a certain amount of controversy regarding my assertion during Rong-Arya's flashbacks that an unshielded 40k-tech frigate might receive slightly more than a messed-up paintjob from a point-blank nuclear detonation. The thing is, a particular kind of nuclear weapon – or, more accurately, _directed fusion weapon_ – is both common and scarily effective in the 41st millennium. You may know it better as the meltagun.

A close-range melta-blast can easily cook through adamantium plating, the armour used on the Imperium's starships and heavy war machines... and by nuclear standards, it's not very powerful. To put things into perspective, a concentrated beam from a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tonnes of TNT (the yield of the Hiroshima nuke) would have a lethal range of several kilometres, something that only the building-sized melta-cannons wielded by Imperial Titans could accomplish... which clearly isn't due to heat-dispersal, because melta-weapons have very narrow beams. Not that that stops a melta-cannon from being able to punch through a forty-metre-tall, adamantium-armoured land-battleship in a single shot, mind you. They just have to be quite close to accomplish it.

Now compare a Cylon planet-buster. Judging by how the blasts those puppies left looked from orbit, I'd peg them as somewhere around the hundred-megatonne range. In the interests of fairness, though, we'll round them down to fifty megatonnes, the yield of the USSR's notorious Tsar Bomba. That, though, is still _two thousand, five hundred times_ the energy released by something capable of one-shotting a Titan, and the undirected nature of the blast is mitigated by the fact that it occurred directly against the hull of the _Stiletto_. Put simply, I don't think that the Chaos ship would be likely to shrug off even one planet-buster impact with merely cosmetic damage, let alone a dozen or so. And the Cylons _like_ their planet-busters.

As for the review mentioning the piece of fluff in which a 680-meg warhead was retired for being ineffective against warships, it's an uncomfortable fact for us 40K fans who try to figure out how the setting works that certain background writers sometimes let their enthusiasm overcome their grasp of accepted science, without even bothering to provide handwaves like the Warp screwing with physics again. As such, it falls to us to cherrypick our information according to what is most plausible and most consistent with all other aspects of the setting... and a blast equivalent to three-and-a-half Krakatoa eruptions being unable to scratch anything bigger than attack craft such as the Thunderhawk gunship (which is vulnerable to _handheld melta weaponry_) throws a lot of things _way_ out of whack.

… Whew, that must be my longest set of Author's Notes yet. Back to dinner-related awkwardness!


	43. Old Acquaintance

**42. Old Acquaintance**

"... So I understand how you couldn't come along for that intervention-thing Nanoha organised to help out the Harlaowns – it was Nanoha who came up with that, right? Thought so. Code Black, Capital Defence Forces freaking out, mountains of paperwork... all that. What I _don't_ get is why you lot never asked me to help out. I mean do you have _any idea_ how long I've been hoping to try out my theories on separately-targeted mass-teleportation? I even spent most of my free time practicing that Dr. Manhattan line." Yuuno's voice flanged eerily. "_You will all return to your homes_."

"Well, I'm very sorry about that," Hayate replied through a mouthful of suspicious-smelling pizza, "but we thought you'd be far too busy. How were we supposed to know that you were wasting your time on overrated Western comic books?"

"Hey, don't knock Moore until you've tried him. Besides, you should count yourself lucky that I'm showing an interest in your planet's fiction at all, after how Vita decided to introduce me to it. What was it again, _Urotsuki_-something-or-other? 'Research into the cultural impact of the Book of Darkness on primitive civilisations', my left _foot_."

The colonel's giggle turned into a cough and she doubled over, narrowly avoiding death by pickled herring _Napolitano_. "I... _hwee_... I remember that. It was when Admiral Graham was paying a visit, wasn't it? There was this scream from the other room, then this little brown blur, and then you were halfway up the admiral's trouser-leg before any of us could react..."

Yuuno felt his face burning. "Look, the ferret thing's a registered anxiety disorder, all right? It's not like I make a deliberate _habit_ of burying myself inside naval officers' clothing when something startles me. Besides, I don't think that the Tome of the Night Sky ever... wait... did it?"

"No."

"Oh. Um. Good. You're sure?"

"Very sure. Incidentally, why _were_ you over then? Maybe it was just my imagination, but you seemed to be around an awful lot when he was doing his supervisory visits. Before those documents about the Book of Darkness Incident got declassified enough for me to read them, I... mean... oh, right. Ah... thanks."

The librarian waved his hands frantically. "Oh, no need to thank me, really. It was Nanoha's idea. Well, sort of. It was more that she mentioned in passing that we might want to keep an eye on good old Gil – I mean, yes, Inspector Acous did vouch for him, but seriously, _who_ trusts that guy the first time they meet him? – and I kind of... ran with it."

Hayate's face fell for no readily discernible reason. "Oh. Nanoha. Of course. Did she... did she suggest this dinner as well? Because if she did, then you... ah... you _really_ didn't need to go to all this effort on my account. I could have quite happily cooked us a meal myself instead of all this" – she indicated the sumptuous banquet and vast, glittering room – "and saved you from having to put in the effort. I mean, not that I'm not grateful, you understand, but, you know, the effort... which I've mentioned three times already, and-"

"No, no, my idea. Definitely my idea. Sorry about all the pomp, but... well, it was my treat and my budget, and I sort of had to pick the Dragon." He grinned. "It was either that, or subject you to an unforgivable lapse in quality when compared to _your_ food." _My word, that was almost suave._

For the second time that evening, Colonel Yagami turned bright pink, mumbled incoherently for a bit, and then went quiet.

"It is... ah... very good food," she finally ventured. "Very tasty."

"Oh yes," Yuuno blurted with rather too much enthusiasm, desperately trying to keep the conversation going without _another_ stall. "The dim sum selection especially. I should really schedule a trip to England, try some from the source. Maybe on my next scheduled leave."

Half a dozen expressions flickered over his dinner-partner's face, before fading into the sort of amused indulgence that told him he'd just got Earthborn culture spectacularly wrong again. "... Sure, Yuuno. You can try that. Just... don't ask for it deep-fried next time. Trust me on this."

He chewed a dumpling contemplatively, resigning himself to the fact that the mystery of its actual country of origin would probably keep him up for the rest of the night. "Ah, yes. I was wondering about that."

It took him a while to notice the intent manner in which Hayate was studying his face. "Is something wrong?"

She practically jumped out of the chair, before forcing a crooked smile. "N-no, nothing. I was... I was just thinking that you look much better when you're not worrying about things."

This time, it was his turn to chuckle. "I thought we'd agreed not to talk about that."

"Right. Um, sorry."

It wasn't working. Even he could see that. They were both just too twitchy, too high-strung to engage in anything as complex as having a meal in the middle of a restaurant. He didn't know whether it was the stress from both their jobs, the lingering pall of Chaos across the city, the intimidating glitziness of the Dragon, or (a small, treacherous part of his hindbrain suggested) just the fact that someone who he had until recently considered something like a younger sister was sitting across from him wearing _that_ dress, but they either needed to do something about it, or call the whole thing off.

Fortunately, he had a solution.

There were certain times in history when the hand of destiny could be physically felt, moments when the multiverse held its breath as the luxury liner cruised towards a lurking mountain of ice, the respected historian picked up the obviously-forged diary whilst reaching for his wallet... and Chief Librarian Yuuno Scrya spoke twelve particular words.

"So, Hayate, think we should give this place's drinks menu a go?"

* * *

The problem with using alcohol to relax, Yuuno glumly reflected, was that it required both of you to actually be able to hold your liquor. Which, as it turned out, Hayate couldn't. At all.

He stood on the pavement outside the White Dragon, with a shield held over his head to stave off the downpour (which only seemed to have worsened since he'd last been outside), and one arm supporting a thoroughly soused citykiller mage. He had elected to leave early, stumbling over his apologies to the staff whilst Hayate belted out an incoherent (and stunningly explicit) Ancient Belkan drinking song that she had presumably learned from Vita. The sole mercy was that he doubted she knew what half the lyrics _meant_, though he couldn't be sure that the same went for some of the older customers, who had started giving them funny looks as he gently herded her out of the door. He would have to remember never to tell her, either; the last thing he needed was an embarrassment-related death on his hands.

Teleporting whilst drunk was right out, which meant standing around in the cold and rain for an indeterminate amount of time until another taxi deigned to pick them up. All this would have been tolerable, though, if he had been able to shake the feeling that the disaster the evening had turned into was _entirely his fault_.

"You know, you could have warned me," he grumbled. "Preferably before I'd ordered the bottle of Arcturan Megavodka."

"... 'rry," she muttered indistinctly, headbutting his shoulder as she leaned against him.

Yuuno sighed. "Never mind. I probably should have asked before skipping straight to the heavy stuff, and I _definitely_ should have been paying attention. I just hope you didn't think I was pressuring you... wait, was I pressuring you? For the Kaiser's sake, _please_ tell me I wasn't-"

An erratically-wobbling hand moved to cover his mouth, almost shoving itself up his nose in the process, and he fell silent.

"Shee, thish right here's yer problem, Yuuno," Hayate proclaimed. "It'sh... it'sh the blaming yourself. The bottling. Heh... bottling. Anyway, what I'm saying ish... ish... ish that you need to shtop with the isholating yourself. The noble shuffering. It'sh not healthy. I mean, it'sh not ash if you're the only one. You seen the dead in yer dreamsh? You realise that you couldn't remember shome of their _names_? You ever wonder if... if maybe this ish something that can't be fixed by just scheduling some criminals for rehabilitation sessions? You wonder if the folks in what'sh left of GovCentral are wondering 'bout that too, and what _answers_ they're going to shtart coming up with?"

She paused, taking a deep breath. Yuuno, for his part, remained silent, though he might have squeezed his arm slightly tighter around her. The voice in his hindbrain informed him that this was the done thing to do in this situation.

"But that'sh irrelevant. Not important. Forget I mentioned it. We're talking about... about you, right? Your problems. 'Cos you've got them, right? You've definitely got them. I mean, jusht take that whole Nanoha thing. What're... what're you trying to prove there? I mean, sure, fine, can't have her sho you might as well be a good friend to her, that makesh sense, but you... you're just _martyring_ yourself. It'sh like... it'sh like you know one option'sh not gonna work, an' you can't even _regishter_ that you might have anyone else interested in... oh, screw it."

Yuuno had opened his mouth again in an attempt to speak, but did not even manage to start a sentence. This was because Colonel Hayate Yagami promptly took advantage of the opening and stuck her tongue down his throat.

What happened next was, of course, involuntary, but as the librarian reflected once he was once more capable of coherent thought, there were certain things that demanded an apology, anxiety disorder or no. One of them, not to be overly specific, was panicking, emitting a blinding flash of green light, turning into a small, carnivorous animal of the type _Mustela putoris furo_, and falling into the front of an old friend's cocktail dress. Especially when it was at that precise moment that the long-overdue taxi finally rounded the corner.

The drive to the transporter terminal was very, very quiet.

* * *

Signum was waiting for them when they finally arrived at Hayate's quarters in the central office, her Barrier Jacket activated and Laevantien at her hip. She did not say a word as they managed the arduous task of attempting to navigate their way through the door, nor as she helped point her mistress in a vaguely bedwards direction. Once that was done, though, Yuuno felt an inhumanly strong hand clamp around his wrist and drag him into an adjacent room.

"Scrya. In here. Now."

_Almighty Sankt Kaiser, saviour of us all, I commend my unworthy soul to your infinite benevolence. Just... not yet. Please?_

He was lifted bodily, his feet dangling in the air, and slammed against the nearest wall without _quite_ the amount of force required to inflict permanent damage. Laevantien's blade halted less than an inch from his throat, held back by a faint green aura. Yuuno thought (hoped) that the Wolkenritter would have stopped in time anyway, but that was no reason not to raise a shield just in case.

"It is now several hours after midnight," Signum stated levelly.

_Oh crap..._

"For what I believe to be the first time in her life, Mistress Hayate is severely inebriated."

_Oh crap, oh crap..._

"There is lipstick on your face."

_Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap..._

"Do you have an explanation for this, Scrya?"

"_I turned into a ferret_! _It doesn't count if you turn into a ferret_!" The librarian's desperate wail could have been heard halfway across the station.

There was a long, pregnant pause as Yuuno's brain slowly caught up with his mouth. "Umm... that is... I mean..."

Slowly, cautiously, and without breaking eye contact for a moment, Signum lowered him to the ground, let go of his collar, and took several steps back, before carefully wiping her gauntlets.

"I have no interest in the details of your bizarre proclivities, Scrya," she said eventually, "so long as Mistress Hayate is _not further involved in them_."

"Right," Yuuno babbled, overjoyed at being able to breathe again. "Fine. Yes. I can do that. Or not. You get the picture."

"Indeed." The bodyguard glanced pointedly at the apartment door. "Now, do you not have other places to be?"

"Yes, yes, of course, sorry for disturbing you..." He paused halfway. "Ah... one thing first, though."

She folded her arms. "That being?"

"I'm..." Yuuno licked his lips, "worried. About her. I know, I know, none of my business, probably going to get shoved out of the door now, but... there's been something off about her since the invasion. No, more, since we lost Vita on Bloodhaven. It's just been getting worse since you got attacked and... Kaiser, _why_ wasn't I there?"

Signum's expression softened almost imperceptibly. "This is something that we have noticed as well, though there was some dispute over the extent. I am not personally qualified to assist in such matters, but will see if I can arrange a meeting between Mistress Hayate and Shamal. Good night, Scrya. I appreciate your concern, if not your... judgment."

"Thanks, Signum. Good night to you too."

Yuuno strolled down the corridor, mentally mapping out the quickest route to the Infinite Library's main portal. The enormous, downy bed in his own quarters seemed increasingly inviting with every step he took.

Sleep was not the only thing on his mind, though – far from it. He trusted the Wolkenritter to do their best for their mistress, but that was no reason not to keep an eye on Hayate himself.

_That's what friends are for, after all._

* * *

The Spiral Nation's base in the Iolaus system had escaped Chaos's ravages relatively unscathed, and its garrison wanted to keep it that way. That was why the planet alone had a quintuple-layered defensive system, that was why its communications were encrypted to the extent that even with the requisite codes it would still take you a quarter of an hour to be able to read them, and that was why enough firepower to level a medium-sized country was currently pointed at the elderly, hooded gentleman attempting to enter the southern gate.

Looking at the man in question, Major Jurgen Gumble could see why.

It wasn't that he was remarkably tall and broad-shouldered, even stooped over and leaning against his curious drill-tipped staff. There were a lot of tall, broad-shouldered men hanging around Naval Command, and most (if not all) of them were better-dressed. It wasn't his aura of overwhelming charisma, because he didn't have one. In fact, ever since he'd shown up, he'd been about as quiet, polite, and unobtrusive as any seven-foot-tall veteran soldier could be.

No, it was his _eyes_.

They burned with long-suppressed power, tiny lines spiralling outwards from the irises like the arms of a galaxy as they bored into your soul. It was impossible to meet the old man's gaze for more than a few seconds without feeling a deep, profound terror of almost theological proportions.

"Look, I'm very sorry for this, sir," Gumble began, very carefully trying not to look up, "and I appreciate that you did the paperwork, but it's going to take a while for us to verify some of the detains, so if you wouldn't mind coming back in... oh, one moment. Pardon me, please."

"Of course, major." A genial smile appeared under the ragged, moth-eaten hood. "It's no problem."

The major strode over towards his frantically-gesticulating comms officer, noting how some of the smaller automated defences seemed to follow him as he moved.

"What is it, Isaiah?"

The gangly technician saluted, his face white. "Message from the top, sir. The _very_ top. All-clearance, effective immediately. That guy you were talking to? We're to let him in. No security checks, no quarantine, no nothing. We're talking _beyond_ VIP status here. Never seen anything like it. Who the hell _is_ he?"

Gumble, for his part, just stared back at the new arrival, who was busy scratching the chin of his pet pigmole, as everything came together in his head at once.

"Oh, _shit_," he breathed.

Simon the Digger raised his head, pulled back his hood, and favoured the two soldiers with another warm smile. "Shall we go, gentlemen?"

* * *

There was a ceiling to the world, an endless, gently-undulating wall of scarred, mangled armour-plates. Iolaus Alef had a negligible human population and few oceans to speak of, which meant that when the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ had limped into orbit a month ago, there had been no real need for it to keep its distance for the tidal cycle's sake. The upset stomachs from the slight gravitic imbalance were considered an acceptable cost.

Simon, for his part, found it oddly comforting. _Like being underground all over again._

Naval Command was a colossal, ziggurat-like structure built around the mass accelerator used to propel materials into orbit. Even it, though, was dwarfed by the maintenance scaffolds that surrounded it, some of them still occupied by the kilometre-tall Space Grappals that loomed over the base like titans of legend. Wisps of green fire played over the vast humanoid war machines as their pilots casually overrode the laws of physics, preventing their mechs from collapsing under their own unimaginable weight.

They were walking through the outskirts of the cluster of low-rise buildings surrounding the headquarters, a maze of warehouses, barracks, workshops, and administrative offices the size of a small town. Their transport, a bulbous, froglike Ganmen with an elongated crew-compartment protruding from its back, squatted on the tarmac behind them, its running-lights blinking in the _Chouginga_'s shadow. It had taken half an hour's flight to get from the main gate to here, weaving through the legs of the titans dominating the base as their smaller, sleeker brethren flew in escort formation around them, their van-sized assault rifles swinging back and forth. Simon had taken the opportunity to have a quick nap, which had unfortunately made Major Gumble and his crew even antsier.

"Well, we're almost there, sir," the short, rotund officer gabbled, his cheeks red as he struggled to keep up with his longer-legged charge, "and I'm really sorry about the delay. Honestly, I ordered that bus ages ago, don't know what's keeping them, you know how it is with these folks, except that you probably don't, what with being a living legend and all, not that I want to imply that you don't care about our problems, because I'm not, I'm sure you're a great guy, and _ohgodIsodidnotsaythat_…"

Simon briefly considered informing him that he was perfectly fine just taking his time and soaking in the (rather magnificent) view, but since he lacked the medical knowledge to deal with the subsequent heart attack, he decided against it.

Hero-worship was a tricky thing to handle; it was one of the reasons he'd left in the first place, after all. Not one of the most _pressing_ reasons, admittedly, but it was at least one he could have a good, therapeutic brood about without dredging up... unpleasantness.

_Just when you think you're out, they draw you back in. Well, I suppose a whirlpool is spiral-shaped, too._

He smiled, the lines in his face deepening. As philosophical insights went, it wasn't one of his best. _I really am out of practice._

There was a clattering sound from up ahead, as if the contents of an ironmonger's workshop had simultaneously decided to take up tap-dancing, and the prophesied bus veered around the corner, its legs pounding into the dusty concrete. The driver's window wound down as it approached, something small and glittering arcing from inside towards Simon.

He snatched it out of the air, not needing to look at it to know what it was, not needing to see inside the cab to know who had thrown it with such particular precision. His fingers ran along the grooves in its surface, a rhythmic warmth pulsing into his palm like the heartbeat of some vast, ancient being.

His pulse raced, his posture straightened, and the years seemed to slough away from his tired frame. Once more, he was a god amongst men. Once more, he was the pathfinder for his people, the hammer of justice that would smite the forces of darkness for their- _no. Not yet. Maybe later, maybe soon, but not yet. Give me some more time, please..._ The moment passed, and he slowly folded back into himself.

"Thought I recognised that driving style, Yoko," he said with forced cheerfulness to the bus as it lurched to a halt. "Good to know that now that your aiming's started to get a bit sloppy, we've still got the option of catching the enemy in the inevitable traffic accident."

A quite unreasonably attractive middle-aged woman poked her head out of the window, her red hair almost black in the darkness, and gave him a look that made his escorts turn pale and subtly edge out of the firing line. "Sorry, Simon. I suppose I'll have to practice. Any body parts you don't mind doing without?"

"Think I'll pass on that, thanks. Don't worry – you'll have plenty of targets soon, from what I hear."

"You hear right. Good grief, I thought we were _done_ with this."

"Life's funny like that, isn't it?" Simon sighed and spread his hands, the Core Drill gleaming faintly. "It's good to see you at least, Yoko."

"You too, Simon."

She stepped out of the vehicle. There was bouncing. Apart from a slight pinkening of the cheeks of some of the younger soldiers (and a squeak from Major Gumble as he dived for his autograph book), there was little reaction from the escort team. Tall, skimpily-clad women carrying rifles as big as themselves did not even register on the average Spiral guard's weirdness meter.

Yoko's eyes narrowed as she noticed Simon's appreciative grin. "What?"

"Just amazed you still fit in that outfit, is all."

"Are you _implying_ something?"

"Who, me?" he asked innocently. "Of course not."

She stalked towards him, her carelessly-swung rifle almost knocking over the major as the latter sidled up to her, autograph-book held up. "And just what right" – she grabbed the collar of his wretched cloak, causing a cloud of dust to rise gently into the air – "do you have to comment on other people's clothes, mister? First thing we do, we're getting you a shower, a hairbrush, and a three-hour chemical bath."

Simon managed an apologetic grimace. "Right, sorry about that. Can't say I've had much reason to pay attention to my appearance, lately, ever since... well, you know."

Yoko paused mid-collar-tug. "Oh. So, you mean there hasn't... no, why would there be? Sorry, stupid question. Forget it."

"No... no, there hasn't been anyone else. I made a promise to move on, and I have, but even so... there's some things I've never been quite prepared to leave behind. Again, you know how it is."

She nodded. "Definitely."

"Ah, so that means that you didn't... you know... either?" This 'you know' was spoken in the exact same way as the others before it, a piece of mutual vocabulary encompassing an entire, tangled knot of shared history.

"I'm afraid not. Different reasons, though. Well, more like _extra_ reasons. After the first two guys die immediately after hooking up with you, romantic pursuits start to lose their appeal a little. It was around about the time when the singles' bar burned down just as I walked through the door that I decided to call it a day."

"Ouch. Still, you seem to be doing pretty well for yourself. Got to see that honours list a while back – one of the few times the exploration team had a clear signal. Bet your staff were over the moon about that one."

"Yes... running the school has been good," Yoko replied slowly, as if reminding herself of the fact. "Very good. That sort of government recognition's nice, too, and the staff _should_ be pleased – they were mostly responsible for us getting it. Almost entirely responsible, in fact. Anyway, we've held up these people long enough – I think it's time to get going, don't you?"

Simon had been out of touch with general society for quite a while, but there were still some verbal cues that he could easily recognise. "Of course. Major?"

Gumble... burbled. Yoko sighed, withdrew a pen from an implausibly small pocket, and signed the open page of the autograph-book, before taking a hasty step back.

The pudgy little officer straightened instantly, executing a perfect salute with lightning speed. "Yesofcoursema'!"

Things proceeded somewhat more smoothly after that.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, the Iolaus Alef base's colossal magnetic accelerator fired again, set to low-velocity in order to avoid liquefying its precious cargo. The capsule's rockets kicked in seconds afterwards, light spreading across the headquarters below like a miniature sunrise. Most people on the ground were far too busy to even spare it a glance, preparing for the maelstrom to come – except one.

Jurgen Gumble watched as it rose, clutching his autograph-book to his chest like a lifebelt as his team's Ganmen flew lazily back towards the gates. He was the only one to see the greenish tinge of the flames emerging from the capsule's nozzles and the way that the vapour trail curled into a narrow, spiralling cone like the thread of a drill, and all he thought about it was that it was an entirely appropriate send-off for the people who were going to win the war.

Even so, the eyes of that strange, bedraggled man called Simon the Digger would haunt him for a long, long time.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** And so the two mysterious figures from Chapter 28 turn out to be... exactly who you were expecting them to be. Gosh, what a surprise.

Yeah, Simon's got some baggage. Figured there was more than one reason for him abandoning his friends at the end of the series. Nice to know he fits in around here, eh?


	44. Pilgrims' Progress

**43. Pilgrims' Progress**

The _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ was the mightiest warship in known space, a factory of destruction capable of bringing the most heavily-defended of star systems to their knees single-handed. It was capable of housing and supplying the combined military forces of an entire planet, of realigning and re-engineering its machinery to perform virtually any task... and with the arrival of the man who had once brought it back to life after a thousand years of slumber, it was _waking up_.

Green flames raced upon deserted corridors like blood through the veins of some vast animal as the arrhythmic throbbing of the wounded reactors began to slow and steady, becoming a deep, even hum. New, gleaming weapons nosed out of the continent-sized flanks, kilometre-wide rents closed with the majesty of temple doors, and for the first time since the War of Liberation, the cavernous factory floors echoed with the sound of gigantic metal boots hitting steel as the first of the newly-forged Space Grappals stepped off the production lines. The _Chouginga_ had been crippled, paralysed, and left pilotless and bereft, but finally, on the eve of the alliance's counterattack, it was preparing for war.

Four hours, three wrecked combs, and a whole lot of scrubbing later, its pilot was ready to join it.

"So what am I supposed to be doing now?" he asked Yoko, who was trying not to feel like she was being dragged along despite the fact that she was walking a few steps in front of him.

"The usual," she replied. "Get this place running again, rally the troops, say a few words, and apply a boot to the backside of some downright unfriendly deities. You know. Inspire."

"I don't get a command-role, then?"

"Nope. Viral offered – quite insistently, in fact – but I talked him down. Figured you'd appreciate that."

"I would indeed. Never really got the hang of all those nitty-gritty details, to be honest."

"True. The speeches were good, though."

He turned to look at her. "Wait, you liked the speeches?"

Yoko sighed. "Simon, you convinced the entire population of the planet to back you against a sentient, genocidal dimension. I think _everyone_ liked the speeches."

"Yes... I suppose so. It's just that everything always went rather fuzzy when I was... half the time I just went with the... never mind. Not important."

The Spiral Nation's greatest warrior averted his eyes in precisely the manner of a child who realised too late that he'd said too much, and Yoko was forced to remind herself that demanding that someone spit out what they were hiding lest they be sent to the naughty corner did not work quite so well on adults. _Since when did Simon do enigmatic?_

The area around the _Chouginga_'s control core had, predictably, been a major target for the Chaos raiders, with entire cubic kilometres of hull, superstructure, and assorted subsystems reduced to mangled, toxic wreckage by their devastating plague-bombs. Even the winding, circuitous route that Simon, Yoko, and their second, rather more professional and heavily-armed, escort team now took was in a bad way, with sagging structural braces, wall-panels blown apart to reveal charred, sparking cables, and tributaries walled off with hastily-erected vacuum barriers.

As they went along their way, though... things _changed_. What once was scorched and twisted gleamed anew, lights blinked on in shattered instrument panels, and scattered debris sprang back into place with mindless enthusiasm. Wisps of raw Spiral Energy played across the passageway's surfaces, reknitting and reshaping everything they touched.

The Spiral Nation did not have much in the way of history or mythology, most of it expunged long ago by the tyrannical rule of the Anti-Spirals and their servants. Rediscovering and imparting what little they had was one of the primary goals of President Rossiu's education system, and far away from her classroom, in the bowels of the vast, ancient ship that had once been called the _Cathedral Terra_, flagship of the legendary Spiral Knights, a memory rose to the forefront of Yoko's mind.

It was of the years immediately after the War of Liberation, when she had still been more a schoolteacher than a headmistress, and the grandiose Littner Memorial Academy was still little more than an idle fantasy. She had been sitting outside with the children at the end of the day, reading from an ancient, fragile, and yet beautifully-maintained storybook, and one illustration in particular had caught her eye. It was of a king or prince, his royal garments lavishly detailed, walking tall and proud through a desert. In his footsteps, tiny plants sprouted, the green of their leaves and the rainbow hues of their flowers still visible even through the fading of the ink. _That's Simon, all ri-_

She was interrupted from her reverie by a flash of green light beside her. Boota the pigmole had been strutting alongside them on his stubby little legs, puffed up with the very particular self-importance that only an undersized meat-animal mainlining pure Spiral Energy could manage. In his place was a short, bipedal, pink-furred creature who looked like an especially weedy beastman.

She gaped. The Boota-creature nervously waved in her direction. She continued to gape.

"Oh, don't mind Boota," Simon said, stepping between them smoothly. "He does that from time to time. Sergeant, mind seeing if you can get him a uniform?"

The officer walking behind them saluted crisply, her face like granite. "Of course, sir."

As the impassive soldier led the ex-pigmole away, Yoko slowly hinged her jaw shut.

"So that... that's a normal thing, is it?" she asked, trying to sound casual. "Just another day in the life of Simon the Digger?"

He shrugged. "It's happened a fair few times, yes. More frequent lately."

She glared at him. "Simon, _he used to ride around in my cleavage_!"

"Yes, I had to... train him out of that habit." Simon at least had the decency to look sheepish. "Caused a few incidents, you see."

"Such as- no, wait, I don't want to know. I _really_ don't want to know. Let's just keep moving, all right? Before the repairs catch up with us."

"Oh. Right. Those." He glanced backwards, looking disquietingly shaken at what he saw. "Good idea."

They picked up the pace, riding the bow-wave of the Spiral's transformations to the ancient dreadnought. The corridor widened, spreading out into one of the vast chambers that contained the core's power conduits, the grinding of gears from the machine itself echoing through the cavernously distant ceiling. Their steps slowed, green lights racing past them as the repairs continued.

"Well, this is it," Simon said quietly. "How do I look?"

The grooming session had improved matters, Yoko had to admit. The years had not been kind to him, but at least now he actually looked his age (specifically, a couple of years younger than her) rather than appearing to have stepped out of the weekly meeting of Deranged Wasteland Elders Anonymous. Also, nobody had ever quite figured out what the traditional garb for Spiral warriors was, but it was near-universally agreed that it didn't involve shirts. As a result, there was a not-inconsiderable amount of gleaming, toned muscle on display next to her, which shifted interestingly in the alien half-light of the _Chouginga_'s interior. _A few more tattoos and he could almost pass for... no, no. Bad Yoko. Bad, bad Yoko. That's quite enough of that._

She grinned lopsidedly at him. "Cleaner than when you got here, at least."

The corner of his mouth twitched. "Good enough."

Simon walked further into the chamber, still gazing up at the titanic conduit. Without needing to be told, Yoko hung back. The universe seemed to be reshaping itself around her, all the drifting, disconnected uncertainty of the past few decades draining away. Her senses seemed more acute, the colours of the world brighter and sharper.

The leader of the Dai-Gurren Brigade drew the Core Drill from his pocket, and looped the chain around his neck.

"Right," he announced matter-of-factly. "I'm ready."

There was, strictly speaking, no real change in his appearance. He just... shifted slightly, his back straightening, his outline seeming somehow clearer and more defined. Nevertheless, the effect was as profound as the birth of a sun, faint ripples of pure _potentiality_ brushing through the souls of every living being within a hundred light-years.

"Thirty years ago, we earned our freedom."

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Everyone onboard the moon-sized starship heard him as easily as if he had been standing next to them.

"The freedom to live our lives as we saw fit. To decide our own safety, our own security. To no longer cower in fear beneath the heavens' wrath."

The chamber's ceiling folded outward as the conduit retreated back into the wall, revealing a long, dark tunnel with a green light at the end.

"And so we grew. We prospered. We reclaimed our heritage, slowly but surely setting our old, warlike ways behind us."

The edges of the floor fell away, leaving a raised platform the size of a city block in the middle of the room. Without turning around, Simon beckoned Yoko and the escort detail forwards.

"But we did not forget the lessons we had learned."

Yoko stepped onto the platform, her legs almost moving of their own accord. There was no complexity any more, no indecision. For the first time in three decades, she had a job to do, a clear, certain purpose, and it felt _wonderful_.

"The ends do not justify the means. Even to save your world, your universe, there are lines that should not be crossed. The false gods of Chaos claimed to be working to save their people from some alien, nebulous threat – and we would have helped them, if they had only asked. Instead, they enslaved millions, slaughtered billions – and one word from us, one tentative agreement to curtail their ambitions, was enough for them to do it to us too."

The platform rose, floating through lairs of armour-plating like geological strata. The green light above them was growing brighter, and faint details of the room it was emanating from were coming into view. Not that Yoko was paying much attention to it – her head was filled with combat manoeuvres, weapon profiles, and the other, endless military trivia of her old life. _Frolov chakra – handy for getting behind the enemy in a close-quarters dogfight... AT-690 Ganmen assault rifle – good weapon, Spiral-compatible, somewhat inaccurate and prone to jamming..._

"This cannot stand. This _will_ not stand."

Their destination was clearly visible now – a red-and-grey titan, five kilometres tall, suspended amidst a forest of interlocking drills. The heart of the _Chouginga_. The _Arc Gurren-Lagann_.

"They think they have crippled us. More, they think us softened, decadent, unable to oppose them. They think that we will allow them to run roughshod over the innocent, to turn entire universes into living nightmares in the name of panicked self-preservation."

He spun to face them, his cloak billowing out behind him. There was a flash of red light as he tugged a set of sunglasses shaped like a five-pointed star out of thin air, putting them on with a grin that was positively devilish.

"Who the _hell_ do they think we are?"

* * *

It is a common urban legend that pets and their owners tend to share certain physical similarities. The same, some naval personnel would argue, is true for ships and their commanders. For instance, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra's flagship, the _Void's Wrath_, was big, noisy, unsubtle, and quite possibly compensating for something.

It was five hundred metres long, an entire third larger than a standard Bureau capital ship, and bristled with weaponry. Aside from the standard 'point defences' which, in typical TSAB fashion, were just as capable of chewing through an enemy ship's hull as they were of shooting down incoming missiles, the twelve heavy coilgun turrets, four citykiller-crewed Magical Interface Systems, and three prow-mounted Arc-en-ciels pushed the battleship's firepower levels from 'impressive' to 'ludicrous'. The defences were no less formidable, a series of innovatively-designed multi-layered wards that could almost match a Chaos frigate's void shields in performance even without MIS backup... and with it, they were nearly impenetrable.

As mighty as the _Void's Wrath_ was, though, the spectacle surrounding it dwarfed it into near-irrelevance.

The one thousand, four hundred, and nineteen dedicated warships and four hundred and eighty-seven support vessels of the First, Second, and Third Fleets were assembled above the industrial planet of Vaizen, their silver hulls gleaming in the world's reflected glow. Amongst and around them flew stranger, more alien vessels – the saucer-hulled Federation and Alliance craft, the long-necked Klingon K't'ingas, and, dominating the gathering, the enormous Star Destroyers and Space Grappals of the New Republic and Spiral Nation respectively.

Operation Guardian was about to commence.

Thundra stumped onto the bridge, bleary-eyed but clear-headed. He wasn't sure that mixing up restorative draughts to help with your superior officer's hangovers was part of a military aide's job description, but so long as Wilson's concoctions worked as well as they did, he wasn't going to complain about it.

"At ease, people, at ease. How's D-space looking, Edix?"

"Bit choppy, sir," the sensors officer replied, "but within expected parameters. Nothing worse than what our extradimensional buddies were facing on the way to this meeting-spot."

"Good. Speaking of, any problems with them yet?"

"None so far, sir," Wilson stated from behind him. "Morale is high, and the Spiral Driver technology has apparently proven most efficacious for dimensional transit. The Spirals themselves are still somewhat delayed in getting their main fleet operational, but this was expected and factored into our existing strategies. One would imagine that repairing a battleship the size of a moon would be somewhat time-intensive."

"Pity. That sort of intimidation-factor would be useful. The more scared they are, the faster they'll surrender, and the less paperwork the rest of us have to write up."

Wilson favoured that comment with one of his small, neat smiles. "Indeed, sir. However, one might hope that a thousand-Arc-en-ciel bombardment might be of some use in that regard. As for other matters, Federation replicators and Suzumiyaverse plasma technology have been fully disseminated amongst the fleet – the latter mostly thanks to the former. A few technical and logistical issues emerged, predictably, but nothing of any real concern save for one major replicator malfunction. Due to that, though, one of our light cruisers, the _Snow Wind_, needed to be evacuated, and will be unable to accompany us. Tea-towels, I believe."

"Tea-towels?"

"Yes, sir. The entire ship is flooded with them."

"... Of course. Well, good thing we brought plenty of spares. I know a few other ships are experiencing personnel shortfalls – see if you can fit in the _Snow Wind_'s crew where you can."

"Certainly, sir. In fact, I anticipated your orders in that regard – they're shoring up the Second Fleet's Twelfth Squadron."

Thundra blinked. "Oh. Right. Well. Good. And the media?"

"Agreed not to deploy embedded reporters. I believe that some political pressure was applied."

"Helpful of them. Glad to know someone in that mess we're calling a government has a functional brain."

Whilst the fleet admiral was not a fan of civilian involvement in the military on principle, his reasons for wanting to keep journalists out of the Bloodhaven assault were rather more detailed. The Chaos raid and its follow-ups had spooked the public, and if they wanted to retain any semblance of morale, they needed a nice, clean propaganda victory.

Unfortunately, there were few better ways to erode popular support for a war than to _actually show people what it involved_, and so whilst freedom of the press was fine and dandy when you knew you were in a position to happily stomp on all who opposed you, it was rather less useful when you were heading into unknown territory against an unknown enemy who had previously demonstrated the ability to hand your backside to you on a silver plate. Far better to invade, get the job done, try to minimise the number of things that would go horribly wrong, and filter back a cheerful, adulatory little report with all the messy bits edited out whilst the public remained largely in the dark. Unless, of course, they bothered to listen to the hundred thousand gossipy combat mages gabbing anonymously on the telepathic network. Which they almost certainly would.

Needless to say, Thundra _really_ hoped that Bureau Intelligence's information-control strategies would be up to scratch.

"Anything else I need to know, then?" he asked.

"A few minor matters, sir. There've been some integration and disciplinary issues amongst our allies, especially the Alpha Quadrant forces. Nothing serious so far, but it would be advisable not to put a Klingon commander in charge of an Aldebaranian formation, for instance. Also, the Humanoid Interfaces wish to speak to you regarding the plans for our approach manoeuvres, there's a good-luck message on your terminal from Minister Varrera, and I took the liberty of washing and ironing all your clothes."

"Wilson," Thundra growled, "_what_ have I told you about rummaging around in my underwear drawer?"

"That I was not to do it again. My apologies, sir. However, if you are going to insist on wearing socks of that particular-"

Someone nearby started sniggering – and immediately stopped as the fleet admiral's baleful gaze swept the room.

"Not. One. More. Word. Anyone."

He rubbed his eyes, taking deep, calming breaths.

"The fleet is ready. Fire up the engines – we move out in five."

The cat-type officer operating the helm saluted, baring her elongated canines in a savage grin. "Aye, sir."

Thundra gazed at the monitors, watching the vast, glittering sweep of the invasion fleet as three thousand ships' thrusters lit up one by one... and then they vanished, replaced by the livid, beet-red face of Admiral Jensen, commanding officer of the Federation detachment.

"Thundra," he snarled, "I just received a coded message from one of my captains. Apparently, those superweapons you sold us have side-effects. _Severe_ side-effects. Which neither you nor any of your people told us about. _Care to explain why_?"

It was amazing, really, how just a few short sentences could ruin your whole day.

* * *

The six Yuuzhan Vong vessels fled through hyperspace, their armoured carapaces cracked and bleeding. There had been fifty of them initially, assigned to stage a daring raid far behind enemy lines against the starship factories of the planet Vulpter. Things had not been going well for the Chosen Race's invasion of the galaxy ever since most of their high-ranking officers had decided to accompany the attack on Coruscant in the hopes of grabbing a share of the glory, and the fragmented remains of the fleet's command structure wanted to prove that even with the Republic's unholy new weaponry, they were not yet truly safe from flaming-rock-related retribution.

That plan, unfortunately, had gone completely out the window as soon as twenty-five Mon Calamari cruisers had showed up, all outfitted with that selfsame 'unholy new weaponry'. One endless hail of bright green death later, the commander of the operation had decided that he could live with a little bit of crushing dishonour and signalled the retreat.

Now, he was squatting amidst the ruins of his bridge, trying to plot a course back to friendly territory that wouldn't result in them smacking straight into a Republic blockade, to ignore the agonised groans of his Matalok-class cruiser, and to figure out an excuse that would ensure the supreme commander would fillet him _quickly_.

The ship lurched, knocking him into an undignified sprawl across the squishy, stinking remains of the chart-table, and a low, ululating howl echoed through the bridge. He staggered to his feet, spitting out vile organic debris.

"And just what in Yun-Yuuzhan's blessed name was _that_?" he roared.

"Interdictors, commander!" the sensors officer replied, panic in his voice. "The infidels have found us!"

"Of all the... All ships to battle-stations! Have the dovin basals shield our forces, and get the enemy on screen!" He paused. "Wait – we do still _have_ a screen, don't we?"

Fortunately, they did, and even more fortunately, it still worked – as did most of their sensors. Once he'd had a good look at what they showed, though, the commander began to wonder if he might have been better off not knowing. They were surrounded – not by the light vessels and fixed defences of a typical enemy blockade, but by twenty-five cruisers of the sleekly bulbous Mon Calamari design, their hulls already glowing with green fire.

_How the _phahg _did they get ahead of us? Nothing should be able to move that fast. Nothing!_

"All hands, brace for im-"

As one, the Spiral-augmented ships opened fire.

* * *

The MC90 Star Cruiser _Riptide_ glided through the wreckage of the Vong escapees like a colossal ocean predator, its Spiral Driver fins retracting into their housings on the outer hull. Inside the transparisteel bubble that was the warship's forward observation platform, Til Kesseck, newly-appointed knight of the Jedi Order, watched the cleanup operation with grim satisfaction. Master Skywalker would have expected them to take prisoners, or at least offer the aliens an opportunity to surrender before blasting them into oblivion, but Master Skywalker was not here, and Master Skywalker had not seen what these monsters had done to a civilian shipyard before their fleet – _his_ fleet – had arrived. Besides, there was really nothing quite like listening to the music of the Spiral, its steady rhythm carrying them along as they laid waste to the enemy.

He felt a disturbance in the Force nearby – a tiny spark of life in the devastation they had created. It was an organic, plant-like escape pod, crammed with the bright sparks of Chazrach slaves and the dark, silent voids of their Yuuzhan Vong masters. He concentrated on one of the Chazrach, reading its simple, sluggish thoughts like pages of a book as it quaked in dull, animal terror. He infiltrated its memories, watching as it used its writhing coufee dagger to peel the skin from a screaming dockworker with mindless enthusiasm. A slight nudge to a nearby starfighter pilot's mind and the link broke, the little reptile's thoughts vanishing in horrified agony as Republic lasers punched through the pod's hull and burned it to a crisp.

Kesseck smiled. He'd been mistaken – there were more enjoyable experiences out there after all. Perhaps the Spiral would show him more of them when it sang again.

* * *

The Klingon Empire and the Cardassian Union did not share an official border. Instead, they were separated by a vast swathe of territory that was in theory under Federation control, but in practice up for grabs by just about anyone – especially since the Year of Chaos. Both nations had colonies and other interests within the region, some of them closer to their opposite numbers' territory than their own, but it was generally agreed that the presence of an eighty-strong Klingon fleet in the Lyshan system, scarcely ten light-years from the Cardassian border, was pushing things a bit.

Then again, the Klingons had recently had their chief of state killed, their worlds ravaged, and the most sacred holy site in their entire empire reduced to rubble, so the finer feelings of the people responsible were not exactly the highest item on their list of priorities.

The Cardassians, of course, had sent a fleet of their own to intercept their unwelcome guests, and the stand-off had been continuing for hours on end, both sides' commanders exchanging increasingly-belligerent demands and counter-demands whilst tensions steadily rose amongst their subordinates.

It was a Cardassian crew that cracked first, their sensors officer staring at the phantom images on his screen until she was convinced that a cloaked squadron of Birds of Prey was sneaking up beneath them. The Galor-class cruiser's prow phasers flicked out, bridging the gap between the two fleets and impacting on a massive Negh'Var battleship's forward shields.

At once, all hell broke loose.

Across the Klingon armada, delicate, glowing fins slid out of the assembled ships' hulls, encasing them in verdant, silently-burning flames. They scattered, charging into the heart of the enemy formation with impossible speed from a dozen different directions at once. The Galor that had fired the opening shot died first, its desperate attacks simply vanishing into its killers' solid green barriers as enhanced disruptor fire literally shook it to pieces. Another twenty ships were quick to follow, their arms and armour no match for the terrible power of the Spiral Drivers.

The Union forces were not entirely devoid of their own aces in the hole, though.

The Klingon ships' sensors went haywire, registering dozens and then hundreds of new contacts. Five hundred of the dull-brown, ray-like Cardassian warships dewarped above the battle's plane of engagement, the entire Third Order deployed in anticipation of precisely this scenario. A pair of K't'ingas on the outer edge of the engagement were the first Imperial casualties, their hulls sliced apart by hundreds of phaser beams even as they overloaded their barriers, the devastating blasts ripping through yet more Union vessels.

The Klingons pulled out of the remains of the Cardassian vanguard, attempting to reposition themselves to face the new threat... when every sensor system on the battlefield whited out at once.

An explosion blossomed in the middle of the Third Order formation, polychromatic light reaching out to consume everything within a two-hundred-kilometre radius. When it faded away, half of the Cardassian fleet had simply vanished.

All around the melee, perfect, two-dimensional circles began to appear, gateways to a sea of gentle green-and-purple light. Small, silver-hulled ships nosed into realspace, their weapon mounts crackling with technosorcerous energy as they swung to aim at the scattered, stunned remains of the Union's defenders.

The commander of one of the new arrivals pressed a single button on her console, sending an encrypted message to a private terminal a dozen universes away.

_This is Commodore Elyse, Artefact Retrieval Unit One. The operation is under way._

* * *

In the belly of the TSAB frigate _Kaiser's Hammer_, Major General Edsyl Pinter, newly-promoted intelligence liaison to Field Marshal Lido, flicked through the message and closed his Device's interface with a small smile. _So. It's begun._

It was regrettable in some ways – wars between primitive civilisations were inevitably a messy business, and cleaning up after this one in particular would probably take a while. Even so, it was necessary. The Cardassian Union was simply too chaotic and aggressive an element to be factored into any long-term plans for the Alpha Quadrant's future, and if they could not be properly incorporated, they needed to be removed.

That said, they had certainly been useful in the short-term. Without their ill-fated attempt to paralyse the Klingons and Federation factions before they managed to arm themselves with Spiral Drivers, certain... counterproductive individuals would still be alive. _And all it took was a little nudge, some directions, and some professional advice._

Of course, things were not going entirely smoothly. Picard's decision to run off to daddy about that little Code Indigo problem had been... disappointing, to say the least, and he'd need to get in contact with the appropriate Alpha Quadrant contacts regarding the appropriate penalties as soon as he could.

Unfortunately, that would probably have to wait until his part in the Bloodhaven intervention was done. Operation Guardian was the largest military undertaking since the fall of Ancient Belka, and his sponsors wanted someone they could trust on the ground there who _wasn't_ the elderly and somewhat senile Lido. His eyebrow twitched in annoyance as he realised that this was probably precisely why the captain had seen fit to leak the information now.

Still, he wouldn't be a trained officer of Bureau Intelligence if he couldn't take advantage of the opportunities at hand... and he could think of a couple of good ones already. _Especially regarding that business with the Infinite Library._

As the invasion fleet began their voyage, Edsyl Pinter hummed tunelessly to himself, smiling all the while. Tomorrow was another day.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Have I mentioned how much I love writing Yuuzhan Vong? Because I do. I really, really do.

Regarding the sheer numbers of ships involved in this chapter, I am quite aware that the U.S. Navy, one of the largest in the world, has only about two hundred dedicated warships to its name, whilst our own Royal Navy has a mere forty or so. One would imagine that armed forces responsible for supervising entire galaxies (or even universes) would operate on a rather larger scale.

See you next time – which, hopefully, will be rather more prompt this time round.


	45. Wake Up Call

**44. Wake-Up Call**

Death had come to the planet.

Monolithic spacecraft filled the sky, impossibly vast bolts of green lightning leaping from their crescent-shaped hulls to scour the ground far below. A silver tide swept over the land, impassive, skull-faced warriors cutting down all in their path. Frozen images leapt out at him from the carnage – here, an isolated squad of soldiers was overrun, their mouths opening and faces contorting in wordless, terrified shrieks as a swarm of gleaming metal insects dragged them away, there, a family was caught in the beams of the invaders' weapons, the unearthly energies stripping away first skin, then flesh, then bone. Throughout it all, not a sound could be heard, as if some grotesquely vivid silent film was being played out for his entertainment.

Instead, his ears were filled with the screaming of three voices – voices belonging to people he had known and cared about for half his life. He raced through a maze of endless, subterranean tunnels, the final, chaotic hours of his world flashing before his eyes as the agonised wailing grew ever-louder.

There was light ahead – dull, dead, and devoid of warmth. The screams had stopped, leaving only quiet, broken sobs. He couldn't tell who was making them, what state they were in, or even whether all of them were still alive.

He reached the surface, the tunnel floor spreading out into a wide, rocky plain. There was no sign of life, let alone the sources of the screams that had lured him here.

That was not to say that there was no movement, though.

Metal gleamed all around him, thousands upon thousands of elongated, inhuman rictus-masks underlit by the vile green glow of their weapons' focusing chambers. More were gathering with every moment, their sculpted faces staring at him impassively. There was blood on some of them – on their feet, their clawed hands, their polished silver armour. As ever, there was no indication of where it had come from.

A shadow crept over them, shroud-like, silent as a cloud but far more regular in shape. The enemy fleet's flagship had arrived, a nine-kilometre-long crescent that moved with a murderous, alien grace. Gauss-lightning crackled across the spires, pyramids, and other, more bizarre geometric structures jutting from the ship's underside in nonsensical, patternless patterns, pristine and anarchically elegant despite the best efforts of the planet's few remaining defence guns.

He had seen this massive tomb-craft at the forefront of the invasion, long strips of armour peeling from its hull as the defenders' orbital batteries pumped enough fire into it to liquefy continents. It hadn't taken it long to repair the damage – minutes at most. Then the defenders' guns were out of ammunition, and thousands of the fragile, mortal human crewmen (plus millions of slightly less fragile cyborg-clones and daemons) who had so obligingly field-tested the invading fleet's defensive capabilities had suddenly found themselves intimately acquainted with its _offensive_ capabilities as well.

Something was descending from the belly of the ship, a point of darkness, a shadow within the shadow. As one, the immortal soldiers surrounding him lifted their heads to gaze upon it, the distant corpse-lights in the hollow sockets of their eyes flaring with recognition. The voices were starting again – a faint, indistinct clawing at the back of his mind.

The dark figure above unfolded, all flapping, cloudy robes of woven night and dull, rippling metal skin. Its yellow eyes bored into his own, pits of smouldering insanity as old as the universe, and he tugged his gaze away, shaking and quivering uncontrollably.

It was not that he had felt fear in that moment, though he had – sheer primal terror that would stop a mortal's heart and burn into the minds of his descendants for a dozen generations. He had felt something worse, something new. For the first time in his few decades of life, the boy who had become a god, the man who had shaped the destiny of universes... felt total _insignificance_.

The whispers rose in pitch and volume, becoming screams once more, and he lashed out, a blast of power melting every alien warrior within eight kilometres before surging towards the silent reaper above. There was a gleam of metal, a slight suggestion of a blade being drawn from the depths of its robe... and then the wall of coruscating energy smashed into it, leaving nothing behind as it forged onwards and shattered the gigantic battleship into a billion tiny fragments.

The screaming had stopped. Everything was silent. He took a slow, careful step forwards, wondering why his legs felt so wobbly, and then _something_ started sliding wetly and he thudded, face-first, into the ground.

That was when the second blow from the scythe took off most of the fingers on his right hand.

An invisible force lifted him into the air, flipping him over before slamming him back into the ground. The cloaked figure was right above him, silent and inexorable as death itself. It reached out with the scythe, the blade losing its razor-edge to become something broader and blunter, before punching into his torso. His eyes widened and he tried to scream, but no sound came out.

He could see the ends of his severed legs. They were half a metre away, bleeding gently into the dirt.

The colossal alien had sharpened its blade again, using it to idly carve abstract patterns into his chest as its other hand reached towards him. The voices gibbered half-comprehensibly, louder with every fresh burst of pain from his tormentor's weapon. There was nothing he could do. Limbless, agonised, he could not even muster the concentration for another useless psychic blast.

The gigantic, clawed hand came closer. There was something dangling from it. A piece of ragged flesh. An eye, as blue as the day she had stepped onto the deck of the carrier, fourteen years old, the same age as him, her yellow dress flapping in the crosswind...

Tzintchi of the Nine Fingers woke up screaming, sobbing, and covered in sweat, his form shifting agitatedly around the edges as he hyperventilated into his bedsheet. A strong, gentle pair of arms embraced him, pulling him against a warm, soft female body as a hand stroked his hair.

"It's all right, Shinji. I'm here, you're safe, it's _all right_..."

His breathing slowed, some faint measure of awareness beginning to return as the nightmare receded. "Ma... ma?"

"That's right," Mislaato replied soothingly. "Mama's here."

* * *

The Eye was apparently in a military mood this morning, resembling a twenty-first-century sci-fi fan's idea of a high-tech command centre as filtered through a madman's scrapyard, several quarts of bad acid, and the lower intestine of a week-dead cancer patient. Reigle was hunched in the corner, manipulating a cluster of pale, fleshy monitors with her dripping pseudopods.

Tzintchi swept through the entrance portal, suit immaculate and hair neatly brushed, a multicoloured nimbus around his head the only evidence of his inhuman nature. Mislaato followed him, looking concerned. She'd suggested that he take some time to centre himself, to recover from the nightmare, but he knew that simply wasn't an option. Now, more than ever, he _needed_ to see their progress in the project that would make this all worthwhile.

The instabilities, predictably, had been getting slowly worse as he and his wives kept exerting themselves to muster their defences against the various universes they'd stirred up. The clones were getting even more psychotic, forcing the fleshcrafters to reduce their intellect more and more, which was hardly good news considering that they needed the artificial beings in order to have an army of any reasonable size. Entire swathes of the Earth were now uninhabitable, reports of unprovoked daemon attacks were becoming too common to ignore, and even his own mind, that which had once been his greatest weapon and most sovereign property, was starting to be affected.

Eighteen years ago, he would have had a solution for all this. A simple, elegant plan, the precisely-engineered details of its architecture gleaming in the workshop of his imagination. Eighteen years ago, he wouldn't have got himself into this situation in the first place. Now, though, he could barely _think_, let alone scheme. Ideas, inspirations, trickled away like water whenever he tried to focus on them and turn them into something concrete. An interdimensional empire awaited his command, and far too often he had nothing to give them.

Worst of all were the fugues, gaps in his routine where he had no idea what he'd been doing or even if he'd been doing anything at all. He'd tried to keep track of his movements, to monitor himself, but in the fluid, uncertain time and space in which he now dwelt, it was a futile endeavour.

He wished that his old mentor, Khnemu of the Thousand Sons, was here to offer him advice. The ancient, time-displaced sorcerer had been the beginning of all this, finding a lost, abandoned little boy still reeling from the death of his mother and turning him into a man capable of overturning the universe. He had not merely been a guiding light and an ideal to aspire to – he had been a father to the young Shinji beyond anything that ice-hearted bastard in distant Tokyo-3 could provide.

Seeking him out now would be impossible, though. There had been an argument, an exile... at least, he thought it had been an exile. He vaguely recalled a little bit more screaming and bloodshed than the typical exile involved. _Warp's teeth, it's so hard to remember anything these days..._

All he had to hold onto now were the reports from the Eye, the tiny, incremental assurances that they were making a difference, that their plans were still approaching fruition. The dream had almost been welcome, a reminder of the evils of the multiverse that they had devoted themselves to ending.

So he smiled at his sister-wife, patted her gently on the head, asked for the usual update, and sank his fingers into the room's phantom furniture until his knuckles turned white.

"Our remaining contacts in the allied universes sent us a message three hours ago," Reigle stated in the dead monotone she'd been adopting increasingly frequently of late. "The collaborative military exercise codenamed 'Operation Guardian' is now underway, and a combined invasion fleet comprising several thousand vessels from at least three different civilisations is headed for Bloodhaven. In accordance with our earlier predictions, they appear to be attempting to close our only remaining route out of the Great Wall. Estimated time of arrival – three weeks."

Tzintchi winced. "Well, that's faster than we'd anticipated. Any guesses on how they managed to untangle their heads from their backsides and assemble a fleet of that size so soon after the pounding we gave them?"

"Conjecture only. However, there has been passing mention of a new technology called the 'Spiral Driver'. Details are vague-to-nonexistent, but the name, I believe, is suggestive enough."

"No kidding. The Spirals have started sharing their technology? I really hope you've got some good news about the Stargate Project, because it's safe to say that _we are running out of time here_."

Reigle's expression changed in a manner entirely unfamiliar to him. On anyone else, though, it would almost have looked... playful.

"There is... something," she replied slowly. "An encoded communiqué from Bloodhaven, intended for the eyes of Lord Tzintchi and Lord Tzintchi alone."

Something went _crunch_ inside the chair Tzintchi was clutching.

"A top secret communiqué, eh?" he asked mildly, reaching over her shoulder to grab the indicated dataslate. "My word. Any idea what's inside it?"

"It was intended for the eyes of Lord Tzintchi and Lord Tzintchi alone," she repeated placidly.

"... but you had a look anyway, didn't you?"

Reigle's only reply was a look conveying an air of injured innocence that should have been quite impossible for anyone in such an advanced state of decay.

He turned to his other wife. "Misato, have you heard anything about this?"

"Sorry, Shinji. I'm as much in the dark as you are."

"Oh, I see what's going on. You're in this together, huh? Don't try to deny it, I know how you think. You're setting me up, aren't you? Aren't you?"

There was silence for a moment, and then someone giggled. Improbably enough, it sounded like Reigle.

"Fine, fine," Tzintchi sighed theatrically. "Here I am, turning on the slate with no idea of what I'm going to find because of the cruel betrayal of two of my very own wives. See? I'm doing it. Not a hint? Not the slightest peep? You wound me, my beloveds. You wound me most grievously."

The slate beeped to life, intricate holographic displays jumping from its gleaming surface. The god flicked through them with short, practiced gestures, nodding his head as he mentally sculpted the reams of data into something halfway comprehensible. Thirty seconds later, he looked up, eyes wide.

"Holy _crap_, does this say what I think it does?"

"You tell us," Mislaato replied, smirking.

"Well, if these guys' calculations are correct... hold on, are they? Let me check their maths... ha, knew it, forgot to carry the _y_ on the third line, and if you look here... see, this is why you don't let mortals do a god's work, let me revise my projections, now, if we filter Plan G through timeline number seventeen, then... oh, wow. That can't be right. That _cannot_ be right."

He was next to his older wife now, waving the slate in her face. "You see this? You see these numbers? _Do you have any bloody idea how far off this is from our initial estimates_?"

She stepped back, her eyebrows raised. "Uhh... Shinji? You do realise not everyone in this room can think in six dimensions, right?"

"Right, right, sorry. OK, breaking it down now. Now, the basic thrust, about the estimated time for the Stargate network to be up and running? Right on the money. Should be getting it all warmed up by the time the bad guys pop up to say hello, which I think we can all agree is a net positive. What they got wrong, though, was the power output from all this." He chuckled, a slight touch of hysteria in his voice. "And boy, do I mean _really_ wrong."

"So the project will be somewhat less effective than anticipated?" Reigle noted calmly. "Very well. I have already prepared a list of workarounds and alternate strategies that should recoup some of our-"

"No, no, that's not it. You don't get it, do you? The output – it's going to be bigger than anticipated. Like, _orders of magnitude_ bigger. Girls, this is a ruddy _paradigm shift_ we're looking at here."

"Wait – so we've won?" Mislaato asked. "Is that what you're saying?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying. That's like saying that Third Impact ended the Middle Eastern Conflict. I mean, it did, but..." He paused and rubbed his eyes. "This isn't about the enemy universes any more. It isn't about justifying what we've done to get to this point. It isn't even about the C'tan. That's irrelevant now. _All_ of it is irrelevant. Everything we have seen, every injustice that we have had to witness and accommodate... it ends here. We," – he gestured expansively – "have just been granted the keys to the multiverse."

"I might still point out, though, that Suzuhara still has the combined forces of several universes descending upon him," Reigle said. "We may wish to formulate some countermeasures."

"Oh?" Tzintchi grinned. "Did you have some suggestions?"

"Not suggestions – progress reports. Asukhon is currently overseeing the creation of a backup fleet, representing a sixty per cent drain on our powers and requiring Class-H resource allocation." She pulled another (slightly sticky) dataslate out of somewhere that he didn't particularly want to speculate about, and tossed it over with a greasy flipper. "Details are here."

"Hah – _knew_ you'd read the message. Was wondering where Asuka was, too. Still, good call. Always nice to have a Plan B. Don't think we'll be needing it, though."

"You're planning something, aren't you?" Mislaato asked. "That's your I-know-something-that-you-don't-know-and-I'm-loving-every-minute-of-it expression. Don't lie. I've seen it before."

Her husband laughed. "OK, OK, you got me. To be honest, though, it's not like I was hiding anything particularly big – just a little side-investigation, one of those 'wouldn't it be nice if' pie-in-the-sky endeavours. With this data, though, especially the figures on psionic transference... we don't even need to set up auxiliary transmitters on the surface. If I didn't know better, I'd say the whole planet was rigged for this sort of thing from the get-go. So keep at it with the contingencies, the countermeasures, and so on. It's good to be prepared, and we've been blindsided too many times already. But in the meantime... I need to make a few calls."

He felt another queasy memory of the nightmare surface, and brushed it aside. _That won't happen. By my father's maggot-ridden corpse, I will not let that happen._

A desk and chair emerged from the roiling netherstuff of the Eye, folding up to accommodate the leader of the gods as he sat down. He rested his elbows on the hard metal surface, folding his hands in front of his face as a pair of gleaming orange sunglasses perched themselves on the bridge of his nose.

"Everything is proceeding according to the scenario."

"So how long have you been waiting to do that for?" his older wife asked, amused.

Tzintchi chuckled. "Misato, you have _no idea_."

* * *

The armoured convoy rumbled along the battered, potholed road, the remote-operated turrets nosing blindly into the sky. They had already fired off two warning salvos to scare off swarms of feral daemons – not strictly necessary, given the current passengers, but after two subjective months on this shift, the crews felt it better to be safe than sorry.

The lead vehicle was a World Raider superheavy tank, a typically overengineered lump of technology with the durability of a nuclear bunker, the firepower of a battleship, and enough transport capacity to hold an entire platoon of soldiers. At the moment, though, the only troops occupying it were a single squad of Space Marines, who were busy keeping a respectful distance from the two women sitting near the front of the passenger compartment.

"The target is Frenchburg, a small town – well, they call it a city – in western Kentucky," Hikari Horaki, daemon princess of Chaos, explained diffidently. "Warp-storms have effectively shut down civilian transport in the southern United States, and we've been hearing rumours of famines and crop-failures in the region... which is pretty much absolute confirmation of that sort of thing, given what we saw in China. Plan is to drop off the equipment and supplies they'll need to stay self-sufficient a while longer, as well as a couple of trained sorcerers to figure out a way to hook them back up to civilisation."

"Well, that sounds neat and all," Asukhon replied, stretching her inhumanly long legs across the tank's cavernous interior and nonchalantly scraping runes into the opposite wall with a clawed toe, "but I really don't see why we couldn't just manifest there, teleport the stuff in, and mix some daiquiris up for the locals whilst they bask in our presence. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. This pussyfooting with convoys just seems... inefficient."

Hikari sighed. "We tried that in China. It... didn't work out so well. You've seen the feral swarms, right? Turns out that having an extremely powerful daemon pop up in your midst doesn't result in the world's greatest first impression. The second town we tried it on, this little place on the Yangtze delta? They had a failsafe, an N2 mine they'd looted from somewhere. If their town got overrun... boom. They probably figured it would be more merciful than what the daemons would do to them, and I can't really dispute their logic. I showed up in their hospital, and... well, you can probably figure out the rest."

"How many were there in the town?"

"Trust me," she said quietly, "you don't want to know. So that's why we're going the slow route. At least armoured convoys are recognisably human. Besides, if _you_ turned up out of the blue? We'd be looking at heart attacks. Multiple. Divine intervention isn't something that most people are used to."

Asukhon nodded. "I see. How long 'til we get there?"

"Ten minutes. We should have a visual shortly."

One of the Marines raised a hand politely. "Ah, that might be a problem, ma'am. This old girl took some pretty heavy damage while we were clearing out Louisville, and what with the tight schedule, the passenger compartment's external monitors were sort of low-priority on the repair list. You may have seen the fresh paint when you were getting in."

Asukhon nodded. "I see. I've got to admit, I've only heard about Louisville – the storm over Kentucky shut down the scrying pools in the Eye for over an hour, and by then, it was all over. Matter of fact, it's half the reason I popped down from orbit to see what was going on. So what were you up against? Can't think of many things that could cut through a World Raider's armour like that, especially after the adamantium shipments from the Stargate universe started coming in."

The hulking, power-armoured super-soldier shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. "Um... with all due respect, Lady Asukhon, they were Valkyries. Your people. The one that sliced the Raider open was about the size of a barn."

Silence fell, muting out even the rumble of the enormous tank's antigravity engines, as the Goddess of Rage's aura expanded to fill the passenger compartment. It was not a physical sensation, per se. There was no pressure between the ears, no prickling of the skin. It simply imparted a thorough, bone-deep understanding to all present that they were currently in a small, confined space with a being who could crack the planet open like an egg if she so chose. Hikari could have sworn that she heard a distant scraping, as of blades being sharpened.

Asukhon, for her part, just smiled, her face twitching as if she wasn't quite sure what shape her skull was supposed to be. "Well, gosh. You learn something new every day, don't you? Still, we'd best fix that monitor business. Can't have us walking in unprepared, can we? Or driving in. Or – heh – floating. Here, let me."

_Gosh._ Hikari couldn't remember the last time Asuka Langley Soryuu had used such a mild oath, and in some ways, that was far more frightening than the effects of her aura, or watching as she drew a claw across her own wrist, thick, arterial-red blood pooling unnaturally into a perfect circle on the floor. The seat's arm-rest dug into her side, and she realised that she had unconsciously edged away from her old friend.

The blood cleared and changed colour, an image swimming into focus beneath its surface. The view was from the air, showing the shallow valley in which the little town resided.

"Huh," another Marine noted. "It didn't look like that in the briefing."

That, Hikari felt, was something of an understatement. _This is going to be another of the bad ones, isn't it?_

Inasmuch as it had been anything, really, Frenchburg had been a tourist town, a stopping-off point from which to explore the surrounding Daniel Boone National Forest, renovated into a bizarre, alien, and strangely beautiful wonderland by the power of the Warp, and the tranquil waters of the nearby Cave Run Lake. Neither the forest nor the place's tourism-friendliness were much in evidence any more.

The three hills surrounding the town had been stripped of vegetation, trenches and fortifications stretching down from their crowns to the highways below to form a rough, uneven defensive line. Some buildings had burnt down, others had simply been hammered flat by some vast, unknown force, and even the mostly intact ones were hardly in the best of repair. Tiny, thankfully-human figures moved along the ground, scurrying towards the nearest hard-points with automatic, practiced efficiency. Unsurprisingly, it appeared that they had seen the convoy coming.

"This town went dark a week ago, right?" Asukhon asked. "Look at those earthworks there – they must have taken months to build. That deforestation doesn't look too recent, either. What the hell's going on here?"

"That'd be one week _subjective_," Hikari replied. "A warp-storm – a bad one – can screw with the time/space continuum in ways we still haven't fully grasped, and the temporal weirdness has only been getting worse since time-squeezing became standard practice in the orbital factories. All that ship construction up there, turning years into days so we can match output with whoever's trying to kill us this week? Sometimes, it leaks. Rough guess? I'd say this town's been out of the loop for more like a decade from their perspective. Not the worst we've seen, but definitely up there."

"You mean... we caused this?"

_Well, I don't see many other people around here capable of trashing Einsteinian physics with the wave of a hand, do you?_ "Pretty much, yes. Judging by the timing, I'd peg this one – and the recent batch of storms in general – as resulting from the Bloodhaven relief force you've been working on, though to be honest, it's hard to tell. They're kind of all over the place these days. Could even be another aftershock from the Divine Assassin training programme all those months ago, for all I know. Yes, I know, I get it, necessary, important, vital for the survival of our civilisation and humanity as a whole, just a step on the road to a brighter tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera. And the fact that it's going to be helping out my husband is nice, too. Let's... just clean up the mess we've got here for now, shall we?"

The goddess nodded. "Yes. Let's."

A piercing whistle sounded from above the tank, culminating in the thud of an explosion off to the side of the road.

"Huh. Seems like they have mortars." More explosions. "OK, make that _lots_ of mortars. Excuse me, Asuka, I need to take care of this."

Hikari made a brief gesture, and a flash of white light emerged from the palm of her hand, vanishing into the vehicle's roof. A silver-white dome of energy formed over the convoy, the remaining artillery rounds pattering onto it like rain.

"Hrm. Good fire-pattern. They seem to be pretty well-organised. Captain, see what you can find on the local frequencies. With any luck, they have a comms network we can tap into."

"Aye, ma'am," the tank commander's voice replied from the other side of the forward bulkhead. "Hold on... looks like we're in luck. They're using pre-Impact military headsets, and the signal's coming in loud and clear. Seems they reckon the convoy's an illusion, and they're trying to flush out whatever's hiding under it. Apparently, it's not the first time that's happened, though never on this scale. They're... pretty freaked out, ma'am. We might be looking at some sort of last-stand protocol here."

"Let's... try not to let that happen, shall we? Get on the line, try to talk them down, and see if we can arrange a meeting. We haven't lost a town on this continent yet, and I don't want this to be our first."

As she glanced again at the scrying pool, something caught Hikari's eye. Frenchburg was the local county seat, the administrative centre of the surrounding area, and as a consequence, the courthouse at the intersection of the two main highways was one of the largest and most impressive buildings in town. After Third Impact had irrevocably wedded church and state across the planet, its significance had only increased. She had seen the photographs taken before the storms, showing the lovingly-detailed devotional murals that wound over the walls like painted vines.

Now, though, the walls were whitewashed. An artillery nest had replaced the older half's central tower, with no sign of the intricate stained-glass windows illustrating the gods' ascension. And the sculpture in front of the main entrance, depicting the eight-pointed star of Chaos in the finest white marble, had been shattered and turned into an impromptu barricade. _OK, that was probably just pragmatism. They needed to fortify the place, and they used the materials available. Besides, I've heard rumours about those murals eating into the side of a building if you leave them too long. Perfectly sensible, logical explanation, right? Right._

_I just hope Asuka hasn't seen this yet._

A hand landed on her shoulder, and she jumped in her seat. When she turned around, Asukhon was grinning at her.

"Hey, Hikari, settle down there. Things're going to be fine. I hear that there's six thousand frankfurters in the front truck alone. The original German ones, pure pork, not that American crap they scrape out of the gutter and put in buns. If that doesn't work as a peace-pipe, I don't know what will."

The daemon blinked. "Hold on – wouldn't an American town prefer the American version?"

A contemplative pause. "Huh. You know, I did _not_ think of that. Anyways, if you're worried about me going all backseat-driver on you, don't be. This is your show. I trust you. Just... try to imagine I'm not here, eh?"

Hikari nodded, smiled, and looked through the scrying pool again, noticing the swarms of feral daemons on the distant horizon. Even her warp-enhanced vision had its limits, but she could swear she saw flashes of red and bronze in the dark, ever-circling clouds. _Forget you're here? Sorry, Asuka, but that might be a bit tricky..._

Above their heads, the next mortar salvo rained down on the shield.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** That's right, you lovely, lovely people, your eyes do not deceive you. This is indeed another update of the Doorstop, and this time it's here to stay. Questions will be answered, further questions will be posed, and the madness will get even... erm... madder.

Have fun!


	46. Employee Relations

**45. Employee Relations**

Twelve minutes later, the shelling had stopped, the convoy was parked outside the town, and Hikari was approaching the Highway 42 barricade, white flag in hand, trying to look as non-threatening as one of the most powerful daemons on the planet possibly could. It probably didn't help that the flag in question had been conjured out of raw warp-energy, and thus contained the destructive potential of a small nuclear bomb, but it had been the best they could get at short notice.

"Good morning," she said politely, sorcerously amplifying her voice to reach the fortifications ahead. "I'm Hikari Horaki. May I speak to Mayor Wright, please?"

"I'm here," a middle-aged man in a threadbare suit replied through a megaphone. "You have five minutes, daemon. Start talking."

Isaiah Wright was not on the local government databases as the mayor of Frenchburg – in fact, they had little to say about him at all. Still, Hikari knew for a fact that he was an extremely brave man, if only because he was the last non-combatant remaining in the town. The convoy's sorcery cadre had detected the remainder of the town's civilians evacuating to hiding places in the nearby hills, leaving the militia to stage a delaying action. It was up to her, of course, to persuade them that such a thing was not necessary.

"Very well, to business then. I am, as you probably know, perhaps the highest-ranking representative of the gods on this planet. This convoy contains extensive food and medical supplies, as well as all the sorcerous assets, security systems, and specialist personnel your town may require to get back on its feet. Furthermore, we have legal personnel, signed authorisation from the highest authorities in our shared civilisation, and just about every other symbol of authenticity you might require in order to check whether we are who we say we are. There's no way we can compensate for the hardships you've been through already, but at the very least, we can end them right now. So, what do you say?"

A pause. "Well, Miss Horaki, that certainly sounds inviting. Tell you what, why don't you send over some of that authentication? Human emissaries, of course. Just to show us you've got 'em."

"That can certainly be arranged. One moment." _Captain, send in the legal team. Unarmed, of course. We don't want to escalate this situation any further than it already is._

_Aye, ma'am,_ the Marine replied over the telepathic link, the words slurred and indistinct through inexperience with sorcery. _Bit of a risk, though, isn't it? This backwoods crowd seems mighty twitchy._

Hikari smiled, despite knowing the expression would not reach through the link. _If it was that much trouble, do you think I would have asked you to do it? Relax, I can ensure their safety well enough without them bringing guns along._

_Roger that, ma'am._

The diplomatic limousine was one of the latest civilian models, a sleek, metallic-blue affair gliding over the mangled, potholed road on its four gently humming grav-projectors. It touched down a short distance in front of the barricade, disgorging the smiling, sharply-dressed legal team as they held up the documents bearing the gods' signatures. Slick, professional, and as unthreatening as possible. _After all, we've had plenty of practice._

As the meeting-and-greeting began, though, Hikari could not help but feel that something was very, _very_ wrong.

There was a slight pressure on her temples, a vague, indistinct presence emanating from the sides of the valley. It could almost have been dismissed as background interference from the Warp, but it was too coherent, too... structured for that.

_Captain, do you have access to the Scholastica Psykana's recruitment rates from this area?_

_One sec... looks like it's been pretty quiet around here, ma'am. I know that psykers are rare and all, but the Scholastica patrols haven't found any here in over a decade. Weird, huh?_

_Not if they didn't want to be found. Get your people under cover, captain. I don't like this._

_Acknowledged._

Back at the barricade, she could see movement amongst the guards. Again, it was subtle, almost random, but with a clear purpose if one knew what to look for. The legal team were being drawn inward by the Frenchburg negotiators, with more and more militia personnel interposing themselves between the foreign diplomats and the outer defences. _Oh, no. I really, really wish I could say I didn't see this coming..._

"Mr. Wright," she said aloud, "would you mind telling those soldiers you've got hidden in the hills to call off their ambush, please? I really don't think it would be terribly productive for either of us."

The mayor looked up, eyes wide. "Wait, how did you- _fuck_. Lieutenant! NOW!"

The hillsides exploded, mortar shells arcing down towards the convoy as the remainder of Frenchburg's militia charged out of their sorcerously-hidden burrows. The barricade guards piled onto the legal team, pressing guns and knives to their vital areas as their compatriots laid down covering fire.

Hikari raised her shield again, projectiles hammering into it like a hellish monsoon and hedge-sorcerers' spells fizzling and dying beneath the otherworldly might of a daemon princess. She wasn't particularly worried by the attack itself – there was nothing they could do to penetrate her wards, and she could teleport the kidnapped diplomats back to safety if it started to look like they were in genuine danger. It seemed likely that Wright's militia knew that too – this was clearly a suicide mission, intended only to stall the intruders long enough for their non-combatants to get to safety. Far more concerning were the _reasons _behind it.

Her voice carried over the mayhem as though in absolute silence, clear and distinct as if she were speaking directly into the ears of every living being in the valley.

"And what, precisely, would this be about?" she asked calmly.

Mayor Wright, for his part, was rather less tranquil.

"You think you're the first, daemon?" he yelled. "The first to come here with the same fancy documents, with food, with human cat's-paws forced to do your bidding by God-knows-what? We believed you once. We let you in, hoping that our ordeal was finally over, and when you'd taken your toll, when we'd buried the few bodies you'd left, we vowed that it would never happen again. I don't give a crap what title you give yourself, what sort of freakish power you wield, or what promises you want to shove down our throats – this is our city, and so long as we breathe, _you will not have it_!"

Hikari blinked. "Wait, what do you mean, the same documents? These were signed by the gods themselves!"

"Yeah, then they've got a bit of a counterfeiting problem, haven't they?" The mayor chuckled grimly. "Word to the wise, daemon, don't try the same trick twice. It gets stale."

"Wait," Hikari called, "we need to talk about-"

A sound from behind interrupted her, sending a thread of liquid nitrogen down her spine. It was not especially loud or jarring, just a gentle, rising hum... the sound of an automated turret powering up.

It was routine policy to deactivate a convoy's sentry guns when a convoy arrived in town, lest they respond to any perceived aggression with lethal force. Hikari had never forgotten it before, but with the extra pressure, with Asukhon looking over her shoulder, it had completely slipped her mind, and now hundreds of innocent people who only wanted to protect their homes were going to pay for it. She closed her eyes, knowing that she could not shut them all down in the scant picoseconds she had left, and not wanting to see the carnage that would follow. The carnage that would be entirely her fault.

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

The sky turned red, streamers of fire dancing across it as every turret in the convoy shattered like day-old icing. A figure hundreds of metres tall rose from the vanguard, towering above Frenchburg like the incarnate wrath of God.

Which was, in fact, exactly what it was.

"Hi, Asukhon here, Eightfold Victor, Lady of Rage, unquestioned ruler of this planet and all who dwell upon it, and the closest you inbred yokels are ever going to get to encountering a genuine Supreme Being. Assuming you don't count me as one of those anyway. You at the back, stop grovelling, you'll only get that shiny uniform your mum made for you all dirty. And we don't want that, do we?" Her colossal eyes narrowed. "Now, here's what you're going to do. You're going to stop shooting at my best friend, you're going to take those supplies we were going to dump in your ingrate hovel, and _you are going to like them_. Then, we will get answers. And if we do not get answers, I will be angry. I am not a fun person when I am angry. Some have even called me... impolite. DO WE HAVE SOME MUTUAL FUCKING COMPREHENSION HERE?"

The shooting stopped, silence ensued, and a not-inconsiderable number of upstanding citizens quietly voided their bowels.

The goddess grinned. "_Fantastic_. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. This is Hikari's operation. Listen to Hikari. She's nice. You'll like her. Sorry, Hikari. Didn't mean to hog the spotlight."

"That's... fine, Asuka," Hikari managed. "Really, it's fine. OK, we'll start with the medical equipment. Squads one through three, you'll help with unpacking. And don't worry about the autoturrets. I'm sure Asuka can fix them. You... ah... can fix them, right?"

The convoy began to resume its journey, paying a deliberate lack of heed to the titanic deity standing over them. The Frenchburg defenders, for their part, were busy disassembling their roadblock with a quite unseemly amount of haste, some of them stopping every so often for a round of panicked prayer.

It was safe to say, Hikari thought, that this job was not going precisely as she had envisaged.

* * *

The mood in Frenchburg was decidedly subdued, like that of a child faced with explaining to his parent why setting the cat on fire had been a completely justified, sensible decision. His abusive parent, in fact, who was fondling a studded belt in a decidedly unsettling manner.

The unarmed civilians had been persuaded to return, as much through fear of divine retribution as through hope that their ordeal was over. They lined the main road, watching wide-eyed as nine-foot-tall Space Marines hauled crate-bedecked grav-pallets towards the courthouse aid station. There were whispers in the crowd, hushed and furtive, and some of the townsfolk would surreptitiously make the sign of the cross every time they thought they were out of sight of the convoy's various nonhuman personnel.

It was not, in short, the sort of welcome that Hikari would have hoped for, but she had to admit that it was far better than having to scrape those same citizens off the Kentucky landscape after the autoturrets were done with them.

She and Asuka were also headed for the courthouse, the goddess having shrunk herself back to less sanity-shattering proportions. Mayor Wright – who had turned out to be a short, round, sleep-deprived man obviously unused to the enormous hunting rifle he carried – had had his staff set up a stage there for the daemon princess to run a Q&A session and assure the citizens that everything was now all right.

This would have been considerably easier if Hikari had been convinced of it herself.

The damage to the town was worse up close, particularly since she could more easily tell what had caused it. Here, a wooden door blackened and warped by a Reigling's acidic bile. There, the charred remains of a building hit by several Black Pharaohs' concentrated fire. And nowhere was there even the slightest hint of the devotional imagery that had once bedecked the inhabitants' homes.

Then her foot struck an irregular object lying in the road, and she saw that she'd been wrong. It was a statuette of red sandstone, still darkly stained with its former owners' modest daily blood-offerings. The head had been snapped off, and a series of crosses crudely scratched into the body, but it was still quite recognisably a depiction of the goddess walking beside her.

She vaporised it with a bolt of hellfire before Asukhon could notice. _Warp's teeth, do I trust her so little now? And for that matter, when did I start using the phrase 'warp's teeth'?_

Mayor Wright had already started addressing the crowd at the courtyard, explaining to them as best he could that the great big army of monsters, mutants, and daemon-worshippers that had just turned up only wanted to give them presents, and were being refreshingly laid-back about the whole 'extended artillery bombardment' business. Most of them looked more surprised by the fact that he was still alive than anything else, and Hikari was reminded yet again of the astonishing courage it must have taken to stay behind with his pitiful little army and try to delay the certain doom approaching his people. If anyone were to come out of this well, she vowed to herself, it would be Isaiah Wright.

"... but that's enough from me," the mayor said. "In addition to the Lady Asukhon, who most of you have already... erm... experienced, we have the privilege of playing host to the gods' chosen daemon princess, the First Ascended, Hikari Horaki herself!"

Hikari strolled onto the stage, carefully ignoring the mutters at the back and the scattered nature of the applause. Wright, for his part, gave her the sort of awkward, please-don't-hurt-anyone smile that only someone who had recently tried to blow said smile's recipient up could accomplish.

"Thank you, Mr. Wright," she said into the microphone. "People of Frenchburg, I wish I could tell you that I understand what you have been through, that I could bring back all that you have lost, that I could take ten years' worth of pain away in the blink of an eye. I cannot. All I can tell you is this – _it has ended_. No longer will you eke out a living from the bare, dry ground. No longer will you watch and wait as your population dwindles through sickness, through accident, and through predation. No longer will you live in fear for every minute of every hour of every day, for the world has not – for _we_ have not forgotten about you. We have food to fill your bellies. We have clothes to shield your bodies. We have building materials to repair your homes. Whatever you wish for, you will be provided wi-"

A rock flew out of the crowd, bouncing harmlessly off her forehead. In an instant, Asukhon was beside her, blades drawn.

"All right, who the _hell_ threw that?"

"I did."

The Frenchburgers drew apart, revealing a scrawny, bald-headed old man who glared at the two women with undisguised hatred.

"Do you think that's it, daemon?" he spat. "Do you think that you can buy us off with cheap gifts? Do you think you can make us forget what your kind did to us in the first place?"

Asukhon gazed at him, her expression impossible to read. "And your name is...?"

"James Macpherson. Born and raised in Frenchburg, witness to everything that you filth tried to-"

She waved him off. "OK, yeah, you're old, crazy, and pissed, I get the picture. You can shut up now."

Black iron spears rained from the sky, forming a cage around the heckler. Red fluid trickled from where their points had struck the ground, as if the very earth itself were bleeding. The Goddess of Rage grinned, her razor-sharp teeth gleaming in the flickering light of the warp-storm above.

"Now... where were we?"

"Asuka, it's fine, you don't need to do this..." Hikari began desperately.

"Sorry, Hikari, I do. See, complaining is fine with me. Disagreeing with our policies? Absolutely cool. Hell, Jimmy, you might be right that our response here is a tad on the half-assed side, considering what this town's been through. But then you tried to hurt a friend of mine during a ceasefire. Doesn't matter that you failed. Doesn't matter that you had less chance of succeeding than a gnat trying to kick down Everest. You. Tried. To. Hurt. My. Friend. And it's a crying shame, Jimmy, but that shit just _does not fly_."

Her face was an inch away from the bars, her golden eyes burning with the promise of divine retribution. Macpherson, however, did not seem appropriately intimidated by this. In fact, he was laughing, tears streaming from his eyes.

"Oh, missy, that's touching. That really is. So what about those who aren't your friends? What about the rest of us? Do we just have to eat dirt whilst your servants tear us to shreds, then act all grateful when you bother to remember we exist? Is that how it works?"

Asukhon hesitated, eyeing her captive from head to toe. "Hold on, am I missing something here? Some kind of medical record, senility, Alzheimer's, whatever? You, uh, do realise that you're talking to a god here, right? You know, really really powerful being who could squash you like a bug in seconds? Just want to know where we're standing, is all."

"Yeah, I know what I'm looking at," Macpherson replied. "Some girl who thinks that killing me qualifies as some sort of evidence of divinity. Missy, I've lived on this Earth for ninety-six years. A cold winter could kill me. A steep flight o'stairs could kill me. Some tiny little bug that'd hardly inconvenience someone half my age – bam, I'm dead. So go ahead. Show these good people what a mighty, powerful being y'are by slaughtering an old man, and send me off to meet some genuine god on the other side. It ain't like you've left me much that I particularly want to hold on to."

"A genuine god, eh?" the goddess purred. "And where, exactly, are you going to find one of those?"

A bony hand reached into a breast pocket, drawing out a tattered Bible. "Here, for a start. And sure, I've read that propaganda you pumped out, about how the old faiths ain't done nothing for us, about how it's pointless to cling onto our ancestral delusions when genuine divinity walks among us... but y'know, He has done something for me. When the skies changed, He listened. When the plants withered and died, when the plagues came, when the hellbeasts cut a bloody swathe through man, woman, and child alike, He listened. He guarded our souls through ten years of hell on Earth, and when the daemons came to take away my daughter and her family, when their claws tore out my grandson's spine as he tried to stop him, it wasn't His face they were wearing. It was yours. Yours and your husband's and all the rest of you posturing filth's. You ain't a god, missy. You ain't a bringer of hope, a preserver and creator. You and your kind belong somewhere a little bit lower... and a whole lot warmer."

"I see. And here I was, giving you an out with the whole senility thing. I'm not totally unreasonable, you know. Still, if that's how you want to play it..." Asukhon gave her muscles a long, feline stretch, her claws extending to the length of breadknives.

"L-lady Asukhon, I feel I must object."

Hikari snapped her gaze away from the mesmeric sight before her, becoming aware once more of her immediate surroundings. The Frenchburgers were drawing closer to the goddess and the pensioner, led by the trembling form of Mayor Wright. Asukhon glanced at them, and they shrank back... but not by very much.

"Wow, that _is_ a lot of disappointed faces," she said, a smirk flickering across her face. "Let's see here, we've got heresy, blasphemy, treachery, a whole bunch of misdemeanours ending in Ys, and none of you give a crap. Why should you, though? He's not the only one to lose faith here, is he? Not the only one so scarred by this decade out of our sight that he's forgotten about the eighteen years of paradise we granted you before?"

"All we-" Wright began, before a claw gently placed at his lips silenced him.

"Oh, hush, it's fine, I get it. Hell, if I were in your place, I'd probably be thinking the same. I'm just another warlord, right? Just another monster who crawled out of Third Impact, broke your stuff, and _would not go away_." She knelt down until she was face-to-face with a wide-eyed child hiding behind her mother's leg. "How about you, little miss? Scared of the big red spiky-lady? Of course you are."

The crowd was silent now, paralysed. The convoy crews had stopped working, listening as raptly as those they had come to assist. Nobody wanted to interrupt an all-powerful Warp-being in the middle of her monologue, accidentally or otherwise.

"To be honest, we haven't been doing much to help, have we? Those eighteen years... they weren't bad, exactly. We made this world a nice, safe place, somewhere that you could raise your children and people wouldn't look at you funny for having three noses. Problem is, that's all it was. Nice. Safe. _Good enough_. A comfortable dead end. We created a retirement home for our species, then fucked off to do our own thing. And when the rest of the multiverse noticed us, when we had to get off our backsides and _act_, it was you folks who got hurt. You folks who suffered. Am I right or am I right?"

In an instant, she was standing again, her aura flowing over the crowd like a river of invisible fire. "But none of that changes the fact that we _are_ gods. In fact, for all our complacency, for all our neglect, we're still more deserving of the name than any tree-spirit or beard-in-the-sky you care to name in this old dirtball's long, long history. Everything we have promised, we can give you, and I think it's high time I provide a demonstration."

The air pressure rose oppressively, the world taking on a faint crimson tinge, and the townsfolk stepped away from Macpherson's cage – all except for Wright, who bowed his head and dug in his heels as the etheric storm washed over him.

"Thing is, though, even when you're playing in our league, you can't get something for nothing," Asukhon continued. "To make a change – a proper, lasting change – you have to make sacrifices. For light, there must be darkness. For life, there must be death. For relief, there must be suffering. And above all of these, above everything in this universe, there must be blood."

Carmine lightning poured from the sky, dancing across Frenchburg's low, shallow rooftops.

"Blood... for the Blood God."

And inside his bladed prison, James Macpherson started screaming.

At first, it was impossible for Hikari to tell what was hurting him so, why he curled into a ball, clawing at his face. Then she, along with everyone else, saw the shapes moving beneath his skin, the unnatural twisting of his limbs, and the way the ground began to shift beneath him.

Macpherson's back arched, his head thrown back, his face a bloody ruin. Thick, brown roots burst out of his mouth, bone crunching as his skull was forced beyond any human tolerance, and sprouts of bright, vivid green emerged from his arms and legs, pushing through wrinkled, aged skin. A moment later, more plants erupted from the ground beneath him, wrapping around their parent and carrying his disintegrating body upwards.

The cage-spears collapsed outwards, carried by the tide of vegetation along with the shredded fragments of the old man's mortal remains. The screaming continued, and Hikari knew she did not want to find out what part of her goddess's newborn creation was still capable of human speech.

Perhaps the most horrific thing of all, though, was that she understood what was happening.

Asukhon was the one who had explained it, in fact, in the days after Third Impact when Hikari was wondering why she wasn't dead any more. It was incorrect, strictly speaking, to say that the gods fed on suffering. Instead, they fed on emotions – in Asukhon's case, rage, hatred, and similar expressions of the desire to do deeply unpleasant things to people you didn't like – and times of great turmoil and suffering tended to cause and be caused by the kinds of unhealthily strong emotion that offered them particular nourishment. Frenchburg, with its years of pent-up resentment and xenophobia, was a particularly tasty treat – though, admittedly, one that barely registered to the universe-spanning appetites of a Chaos God.

Mostly, this feeding was passive. All that a Warp-entity had to do was exist in the same universe as beings capable of its patron emotion, and it would be nourished indefinitely. The more suitable mortals present, the more powerful the entity. It wasn't even parasitic – that would imply that something was being taken away. However, it was also possible for a god to engage in _active_ feeding, directly touching a living being's soul and drawing out a more potent, purified form of food-energy through appropriately holy conduits, if they wanted a quick and easy power-boost. Like now.

Asukhon was using Macpherson's blood as her conduit, drawing out the light of his soul in order to bless Frenchburg with the new life it had been denied for so long. It was a genuine miracle, the hand of the divine at work in a way that no-one present could refute.

Hikari just wished that it didn't involve a frail old man being ripped to shreds. Particularly since a few milligrams from the veins of everyone in town would have done the job just as well. _Ah, but that wouldn't have been nearly as fun, would it?_ a nasty little voice in the back of her head whispered. _Got to keep the glorious Lady Asukhon happy. Even if it does involve being an accessory to murder. Because if we don't... who knows what's going to happen?_

She ignored it, as she had the past dozen times she had heard it, and kept watching. It was all she could do.

The wave of plantlife broke against the crowd, racing past them towards the distant hills. Red light began to gather around where Macpherson had once stood, steadily building in volume and intensity until it erupted in a vast, blinding flare. When it dissipated, everything had changed.

The sky was a deep, cloudless blue, the sun shining down on acre after acre of ripened crop-fields that gently rippled in the wind. Beyond, the endless forests of the Daniel Boone reserve stretched to the horizon, seeming greener and more welcoming than at any other time in living memory. Frenchburg's streets were clear of debris, broad and welcoming and lined with tall, graceful trees sporting fruits of every description, hanging alongside each other, bulging and ripe, regardless of climate, season, and even the boundaries of species.

The area in front of the courthouse was now a flower-covered meadow, their petals a bewildering, hypnotic array of colours both known and unknown to human sight. Delicate vines trailed over the ruined sculpture-barricade in front of the entrance, the curls of their tendrils depicting scenes from the gods' ascension in minute detail.

At the centre of it all, where Macpherson's cage had been only a few minutes ago, was a single, massive tree of completely indeterminate species, its mighty boughs dragged down by an even greater variety of fruit than any of the others, and its swaying leaves shielding the entire assembled crowd from the bright midday sun.

There was a creaking from inside its trunk, the bark pulled itself apart... and Mayor Wright popped out, roots bursting from the ground to catch him in a makeshift chair.

At that point, Hikari stopped watching. The sacrifice had been bad enough on its own, but she could deal with that. She couldn't _like_ it, but she could deal with it. To cap it off in such an absurd, cartoonish manner, though, to show just how insignificant an effort it had actually been... that, she could not deal with. Not whilst remaining sane.

Asukhon had started making another speech, and the daemon princess could fill in the words without even listening. Not even a beginning, only a tech demo, obviously you'll want a little more than some nice vegetation as compensation, let's see what we can do... The energies of the Warp gathered again, drawing the decades of rage from the soil of Frenchburg as the goddess worked her magic. Still, Hikari did not, _could_ not watch. Instead, she turned her attention back to her convoy.

The supply teams were already packing up, their efforts irrelevant before the divine intervention unfolding around them. Some were simply staring at the spectacle, their duties forgotten, whilst others muttered prayers that Hikari doubted were all from approved scriptures. A splash of too-red blood struck a grey-haired, paunchy technician in the back of the neck and he fell to the ground, the thousand imperfections of age and ill-health melting away from his frame as his eyes blazed with awakened sorcerous power. Trucks attempting to navigate the pothole-studded highway found their route transmuted into a pristine ribbon of fresh, black tarmac, whilst yet more sprays of the sacred blood, seemingly released from Frenchburg's very soil, washed away wear, grime, and malfunction from their now-gleaming hulls.

Finally, it was over, and she forced herself to turn back towards the town they had come to save. It would have been easy to say that Frenchburg was unrecognisable, but that was simply not the case. Instead, it was... _more_, the Platonic ideal that the old Frenchburg had seemingly been a faded, muddied reflection of. Houses had become mansions, but were still recognisably of the same general architectural style and construction. The courthouse could now more accurately be described as a cathedral, its walls covered with even more ornate decorations than the ones the townsfolk had previously erased, but retained its basic shape and structure. The valley itself seemed to have expanded, widening and deepening to contain the plenties within. Finally, the people themselves were younger, healthier, and more vibrant, their souls alight with Warp-power. Some of the younger ones had already started experimenting, taking short flights over the rooftops and telekinetically plucking fruit from the trees, whilst the adults simply stood where they were, gazing about in utter, sanity-straining incomprehension.

Mayor Wright was weeping. Hikari did not think that even he could have properly articulated all the reasons why.

A hand landed on her shoulder, causing her to start in a quite undaemonlike manner. Asukhon was standing next to her, an apologetic smile hovering about her lips.

"Hi there, Hikari. Can we talk, please?"

"S-sure, Asuka. What is it?"

The goddess averted her eyes. "The daemon attacks, the ones you've been clearing up after. The ones that wrecked this town. That was... that was me."

Hikari blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You... know how crafted daemons work, right? I told you, I must have done." Asukhon was close now, talking fast, her words tripping over each other. "They're... parts of me, extensions of my mind and body." Light flashed in the palm of her hand, a tiny female figure blinking and yawning. "See that? That's me. What I feel, she feels. What I think, she thinks. You can't deceive a crafted daemon. You can't muddy its orders. Everything they do, they do because _I_ wanted to do it."

"Asuka, are you saying...?"

"Yeah, I am. There was a part of me that wanted to destroy those towns, kill those people. A part of me that wanted to burn them out of the mudpiles they call houses, split them apart and feast on their bones. And I know why."

Hikari said nothing. Her old friend was still gripping her shoulder, knuckles hard and pale inside her carmine skin.

"You saw it yourself, Hikari. You saw it when I ended that old coot Macpherson. I felt his death, you know. I felt every moment of it. His skin splitting, his organs collapsing, the little tingles of electricity along his nerves as his brain shut down... oh _God_, it was wonderful."

Asukhon shuddered, her face warring between rapture and loathing. A finger stroked Hikari's shoulder, seemingly of its own volition.

"And you know what? Every time I draw on more power, every time I try to pull ourselves out of this mess we've landed in... _it gets better_. I don't just want this bloodshed, this chaos any more, I _need_ it. I'm... slipping. I know this is temporary, that it'll all be over in just a few short weeks, but... I'm feeling less and less like myself every day. I need... I need someone to talk to. Someone who isn't losing themselves the same way I am. I know you've got a lot on your plate, Hikari, and I know that most of it's my – our – fault... but can you do that for me? Please?"

Memories surfaced in the dark corners of Hikari's mind. The bloody ruin they had found in a house in Louisville, all that was left of a family of six after the Valkyries had descended upon them. The smile on Asukhon's face as she watched a ninety-six-year-old draw his final, shrieking breaths. The long, terrible hours in the darkness beneath the Palace of the Gods, with only the creature she had once called Misato Katsuragi for company.

"Of course, Asuka," she replied, placing her own hand atop the Goddess of Rage's much larger one. "What else are friends for?"

An apple plucked from the courthouse tree bounced and rolled past their feet, rapidly pursued by a laughing Frenchburg child. In its gleaming red surface, Hikari saw the reflection of an old man's screaming face.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** So we got a bit into real-world religion this chapter – always a fun little powderkeg. For the record, I'm an atheist – I have no real objection to religion as a concept, but have personally never felt a particular need for or inclination towards it. If you find anything I've written grotesquely offensive, feel free to rant at length in the reviews section, and I'll be sure to pay heed. Everyone makes mistakes, but that's no excuse not to learn from them.

Oh, and since Frenchburg, Kentucky, is actually a real city, that goes for any disgruntled citizens from there, too. Hey, count yourselves lucky that you got off better than any of my Vietnamese readers, at least...


	47. Investment Strategies

**46. Investment Strategies**

One subjective hour after Tzintchi had left, the Eye was utterly silent. Its sole occupant lay suspended in a night-dark void, colourless images of the multiverse floating around its body like dead fish in a polluted lake.

A wall formed behind the reclining figure, velvet curtains billowing out from lavishly-decorated windows as the glare of an alien sun gleamed off the marble windowsills. A door opened and another being walked in, briefly framed by a garden of terrible and otherworldly delights before the doorway and its attendant wall vanished again, an afterscent of alien perfumes lingering in the illusory air.

"Holy _crap_, but it is dull in here."

The being at the centre of the Eye looked up, a rheumy compound cluster blinking open in its lower head. "A matter of opinion. I, for one, find it restful. Then again, you were never one for restfulness, were you, little brother?"

The newcomer was silent for a moment. "OK, how long have you known?"

"Since shortly after your usurpation. Your attempts at subtlety are admirable, brother, but you lack the... personality for it to be truly effective. Especially when someone's known you as long as I have. I must assume that you came here to ascertain my identity. Now you've accomplished that, is there anything more that keeps you here?"

The other being considered this. "Well, we could... uhh... chat for a bit. I mean, it's been a while, after all. Not by our usual standards, obviously, but you know how it is in these bodies, time just seems to _draaag_ on by. So, how about that Stargate thingy, then? We going to be done here soon? Because this was fun at first, new experience, fresh start, all that shit, but frankly... it's starting to get stale."

A jaundiced, drooling smile split the first entity's face. "Relax, brother. The project is going precisely according to schedule. It won't be long now."

"You sure? 'Cos that's what you said about that godling you've got locked in the basement, and I think he's still mouldering down there. Sure, sure, that was fine and dandy whilst the mission plan was to let this piss-stain of an empire run itself into the ground, but now we're so freakin' close to a Good End and you still haven't rustled up that contingency you promised in case it doesn't work and everything goes to shit... well, I'm starting to wonder if your personal definition of 'won't be long now' is exactly in tune with everyone else's."

"You know, I hardly think you're in a position to be casting aspersions on others' reliability."

"Oh, don't give me that. It was just one time, and I made it perfectly clear that it was a matter of survival. I got the rest of you through just fine, didn't I? That's me, perfectly trustworthy. Just, y'know, not suicidal."

"Then I assume that you've received signs of our elder brother's awakening?"

"Yeah, he's somewhere all right. No idea where or what he's up to, the fucker's slippery as ever, but there's sure as hell something going on with that kid of his. The nightmares, the weird judgment calls... someone's messing with his head, and it ain't me for once." A lascivious grin. "Though the messing is kinda fun. Did you know he calls me 'Mama' sometimes?"

"No. Nor did I want to."

"Aww, you're no fun. And I gave you the cute one and everything. Hey, tell me you at least managed to take her intact."

The silence of the Eye deepened for a moment. "No. She's... gone."

"Oh, now that is just a crying shame. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't have mine around to keep me company. Sure, she's getting on a bit, and my little pet didn't leave her in the greatest shape when he was done with her, but hey, age is experience, right? Plus, taking those shredded little bits of her mind apart and putting them back together in all those new and interesting ways? That never gets old. It's like Play-Doh. You know Play-Doh? It's this mortal toy. Fantastic invention. Kept me busy for hours. Tastes pretty good, too."

There was no response.

"Ah yeah, that's why we didn't do this small-talk thing back home too often. You were always so bloody awful at it. Seriously, not even one of those crappy jokes of yours? Did you run out or something? Anyways, best be going. Things to see, people to do. Just... remember your side of the bargain, yeah? Yeah. Hate for all this effort I put in to be for nothing."

The aeons-old creature now calling itself Mislaato of the Six Wounds exited in a trail of gaudy lights, a cool breeze caressing the Eye's interior with a hint of exotic spices. The other lay back again, letting the silence wash over his own borrowed body, the mutated, plague-scarred face of a girl once known as Rei Ayanami settling into a contented smile.

"I will. Farewell, little brother."

The Eye, in its current state, was inhospitable to his kind, a barren wasteland without a life, without a soul's worth of nourishment. These days, there was no place he'd rather be, and he was content to drift for a moment, savouring the isolation... but only for a moment. There was work to be done.

As repulsive as he undoubtedly was, his brother had actually made a pretty good point. It was indeed time to see about activating his own weapon, particularly if the third of their number was indeed awake and being as troublesomely unpredictable as ever. Better yet, said weapon was more than suitably... ripe.

The pictures changed, now showing the dank, intestinal undulations of the sewer network beneath the Palace, and once more, sound returned to the Eye.

* * *

The tunnel walls dripped with enigmatic fluids, the wheezing, sickly breaths of its two occupants echoing disquietly into the distance. They were huddled on a ledge above a steaming, verdigrised grille, wrapped tight in stolen military greatcoats. The taller of the two was trying to feed the shorter one with thin, lumpy broth from a steel tin, droplets spilling across them both with every quiver of his palsied hand.

"Come on, Vita, you've got to swallow. That shouldn't be too hard, huh? Just a bit of soup – that can't beat a top-of-the-line super-soldier, right? Wait, I've got some... here you go..."

The short figure chuckled, the noise rapidly degrading into a bubbling cough. "That's... that's enough, kid. It's all right. We both know I'm not going to make it. Guess those biotech viruses worked after all, huh? Give that bitch Reigle a nice big 'fuck you' next time you see her. You know, for me."

"But... there's got to be something, hasn't there? The reset, the one we used before... the side-effects can't be that bad, can they?"

"We've been... _nngh_... we've been over this. Resets only work if the system remembers how it's supposed to be, and I'm too badly infected, the corruption's too deep. If we used the Stahlwind code, there's no telling _what_ I'd end up as, but I'm guessing it wouldn't exactly inherit my piercing intelligence or stunning good looks."

"Or your charming personality."

A weak, childlike giggle. "Right."

"OK, so that's out. What about having a go at another breakout? There must be some way we haven't tried. Maybe if we..."

"... talk to the Marine kill-teams up top and ask them nicely to put their guns down? Let's face it, that's pretty much all we're good for now." Her tone softened. "Look, kid, the thing about death... it isn't necessarily permanent for us. The Wolkenritter, I mean. The Tome of the Night Sky used to keep us backed up in its main banks, and whilst it's not exactly in the best shape these days, and most of our links with it got cut after its central personality gave herself a lobotomy... I think that a master who knows what they're doing can bring us back if we die. You see? When Hayate comes, I'll be fine. I've got to be fine. I've done all the calculations, I think it'll be all right... it has to be all right, doesn't it? I can't let her... I can't let any of them... damn it, why should I be scared of this? We all knew it was going to happen, we chose it, but not like this, I didn't think it would be like this..."

Her companion put the soup down, wrapping his arms around her. Neither of them looked at the other one's face.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered under his breath, voice thick and shaky. "Jesus _fucking_ Christ..."

They stayed like that for a while, still and cold, alone in the darkness, doing what little they could to remind each other of their shared, continued existence. Eventually, they moved apart, the taller one's foot knocking over the soup and sending it skittering into the river of sewage below. Neither noticed. Neither would have cared if they had. It was far too late for it to matter.

"So, kid," the shorter one said after a while. "I've been wondering. You the... religious type?"

"Eh? Oh, right, the Christ thing. Just an old childhood habit – Christianity was a bit of a fad religion when I was a kid. The Kyoto diocese was big on evangelising at the time, and though I never really bought into it – hell, I didn't even believe in Santa by that point – some of the lingo ended up rubbing off. Plus, casual blasphemy? _Really_ therapeutic."

He smiled, leaning back against the moss-coated wall.

"Truth be told, I'd say religion's probably not an option for me by this point. I've met a fair few gods now, and when _Haruhi_, of all people, is the one you'd be most inclined to worship if you were forced to make a choice... no. Just no."

His companion laughed. "Yeah, I get that. As one of the last remnants of Ancient Belka, I should probably worship the divine Sankt Kaiser who saved us all... but I've met her, and she's a sweet kid with two absolutely great parents, but I'm not inclined to be performing genuflections anytime s-soo-"

She doubled over, coughing. Dark liquid spattered across the front of her clothes. The taller one was upright in an instant, scrabbling through the bulky sack beside them.

"Vita, damn it, hold on, it'll be fine, it's going to be just fine... where the hell is that bloody medpack...? Stay with me, all right, Vita? Stay with me."

"Hey... Kyon?" The voice was little more than a whisper. "Funny... thing, just occurred... to me. For a guy... you're actually... _hhh_... pretty... _hhh_... cute..."

"Vita? Vita? C'mon, that wasn't funny. Seriously, stop it, will you... Vita?"

Within the Eye, the watcher smiled. This was what he had been preparing for. The months of isolation, of despair, of glorious decay... all for this moment. And as he watched the changing expressions on his weapon's face as he cradled a small, ragged shape in his arms, he knew that he'd got the timing exactly right.

It took ten minutes, all told – slightly longer than the ideal, but entirely acceptable. The weapon put his tiny burden down, dragging the sack over to create a makeshift pillow.

"I'm sorry, Vita. Oh God, I'm sorry. _Stahlwind B-2_."

There was a stirring beneath the little one's heavy greatcoat, strange organic sounds permeating through the thick wool as faint, dirty red light illuminated the room. When it was over, she sat up, her impromptu blanket falling away.

The watcher saw the look in his weapon's eyes as he beheld his creation, felt the last embers of poisonous hope die within him as the creature's mouths opened in a wordless, mindless scream, and felt his shattered consciousness yawn before him like an empty vessel ready to be filled. He had prepared a conduit, of course. Months before, when the weapon had first come to this place, thinking it a safe refuge, he had invited the Queen of Plagues into his heart, and the being who had replaced her was finally ready to take him up on the offer.

Nurgle, Lord of Decay, third of the Gods of Chaos, entered his victim's mind and got to work.

* * *

Three subjective hours later, the Old God retreated to the Eye. Everything was still proceeding as planned, and he'd made some very definite progress, but the forging was far more time-consuming and stressful than even he had anticipated. _The sheer metaphysical energies involved alone..._

This was why he had not begun sooner, and why he had been forced to start now. Less time between forging and activation meant less time for the others to discover his personal modifications to their fresh new superweapon, but if he left it too late, all his effort would be for naught as someone else made their move first – loyalty, after all, had never been much of a family trait. As things stood, he would barely be able to get things running by the time the others' much-vaunted Stargate project failed.

Of course, he would first have to make sure that it _did_ fail. Whilst the forces arrayed against Bloodhaven seemed reasonably competent, he'd never been one to leave things to chance, and the countermeasure brought up at the morning meeting presented some problems that he would have to address... without leaving too much evidence of his involvement.

Fortunately, he had exactly the tools for the job, created many months before in their initial encounters with the universe in question. They were, of course, supposed to be discarded along with everything else once the dimension's continual stability and prosperity was no longer a strategic objective, but unlike his brothers – so eager for the vivid, the fresh, the new – he had never been good at throwing things away.

_No – that's a lie, isn't it? It was always easy, so easy I didn't even notice I was doing it long before the C'tan rose. Grandfather Nurgle, so many children he couldn't even remember their faces..._

_And then one. Just one. And we know what happened to her, don't we?_

The Old God did what was necessary, feeling the echoes of his disciples' deaths slowly begin to trickle back from half a multiverse away. He hoped they would find peace. He'd be sending a lot more after them soon enough.

* * *

The _Glory of Origin_ was not the ultimate weapon of the ascended posthumans called the Ori. It was, however, pretty close.

The dreadnought was two-and-a-half kilometres long, over twice the size of a standard Ori warship, and correspondingly heavily-armed. It had four prow beam cannons, each capable of razing a continent down to the bedrock, two slightly smaller ones on each flank, and hundreds of plasma pulseguns of various calibres arranged into batteries all over its hull. Its six onboard gates could disgorge an endless tide of soldiers from garrison-planets a galaxy away, its hangars held over two thousand heavily-armed fighter-bombers, and it was crewed by no less than twelve Priors, the unstoppable warrior-priests who served as the heralds of Origin.

Normally, the _Glory_ would never have ventured outside its home-galaxy, the seat of the Ori's power. It was more a symbol than an active warship, a monument to the living gods' power to keep the congregation in line. They had never come up against anything nasty enough to warrant actually using it in combat until that terrible day above Unenlightened 157, the planet called 'Bloodhaven', when they had lost over sixteen warships in less than four hours. There were strange and troubling things dwelling within this galaxy, and if it were to be delivered into the cleansing light of Origin, extreme measures would be required.

Even so, Commander Matheon could not help but feel that the five hundred warships which had joined the _Glory_ in the Ver Kadros system were perhaps a bit much. Especially since they'd originally been under the impression that four of their vessels would be enough to pacify the entire galaxy.

His own ship, the _Blessed Flame_, was on patrol in the galactic west, the utmost border of the Ori's current domain. Beyond were the remaining worlds occupied by the Jaffa, genetically-engineered humans once enslaved by the alien parasites called the Goa'uld, as well as the planet of the Tau'ri, their greatest foes and the ones responsible for bringing their attention to this galaxy. The planet called Earth.

Matheon and his fellow commanders were gathered in the _Blessed Flame_'s officers' mess, one wall of which was dominated by a gigantic viewscreen. On the other side of the screen was a living god.

Adria stood in the primary hanger of the _Glory of Origin_, facing rank upon rank of kneeling, silver-armoured soldiers. Even given the size of the screen, she was tiny, a slim, dark-haired teenager in simple blue robes, and yet even in the _Divine Blade_'s mess, a hundred light-years away, they could feel the power that emanated from her. The supreme commander of the Ori army, the child-messiah of Origin, the perfect fusion of mortal and divine, she was to a Prior what a Prior was to an unenlightened layman. The first living hybrid of human and Ori. The Orici.

"Brothers and sisters," she began in her clear, youthful voice, "we have suffered much. This crusade, this great enlightenment, has dragged on for too long, forced us to sacrifice too much of our blessed creed on the altar of necessity, and even caused... divisions in our ranks. However, with every great trial, there is great opportunity. When the corrupt and decadent Ancients' Stargates fell, hundreds died, but the purity of our own blessed gates endured, and our enemies now have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from our righteous blades. Even before that, when Chaos arrived in our universe, armed our enemies, and turned them against us, we endured their attacks, we burned their stronghold to ashes, and we learned the secrets of their weapons. We are invincible, we are unstoppable, and now, my brothers and sisters, _now_... we shall be immortal."

The assembled soldiery roared, brandishing their gleaming new hellguns. Even as far away as the camera was, Matheon could still see the faint glow of the weapons' telltale runes. _Why do those disturb me so much? Why do they feel so... familiar? _He semiconsciously caressed the pistol at his hip, its reassuring warmth radiating through his worn leather glove.

"Origin has always been the true path to ascension, and those that walk it do so alongside the gods of ages past. However, that path has been blocked. You know of the Ancients, the Ori's fallen brethren who selfishly seek to keep that power for themselves, and you know that only through unbending faith in our gods may they gain the strength to reclaim humanity's birthright from their dark kin's grasping claws. I am here to tell you that this is no longer the case. The Ancients are no longer an obstacle, and with one final effort, the way to ascension shall be reopened."

The broadcast had switched to a camera closer to Adria, her beautiful face alight with divine benevolence, and Matheon leaned in, losing himself in her words – before a gleam of metal at her throat caught his eye.

"We drove Chaos from our universe, but they have returned. At the site of their defeat, in the ruins of Bloodhaven, they prepare a dark ritual as I speak, a ritual intended to overturn existence itself, and yet as vile as their sorcery is, as loathsome as their goals are, even this can serve the purposes of the Ori."

In every picture of the Orici Matheon had seen, she had worn a simple silver pendant in the shape of the symbol of Origin. It was not just a badge of rank – it was an open secret that the tiny device contained an immensely powerful personal shield, rendering its owner impervious to anything short of an orbital bombardment – and most followers of Origin devoutly believed that she would be able to shrug that off, too. In none of those pictures, though, had the pendant looked quite as it did now.

Its clean lines had been distorted out of shape, the horseshoe-teardrop of Origin becoming something that seemed simultaneously fiery and piscine. Matheon only knew of one other thing that even looked remotely similar – the runic script decorating the Ori army's new weaponry. _It's just a coincidence, it's got to be- no, no, this isn't right, why do I...?_

"This is why I am here before you," Adria continued on the screen. "This is why this grand armada has been assembled, why we have pulled back from our assaults on the heretic Tau'ri and Free Jaffa. We will go to Bloodhaven. We will crush the slaves of Chaos for their temerity. We shall take their power, and the Ori shall burn away its darkness with their blessed light. It will be our final weapon against the Ancients and our final key for the door to ascension, and taking it shall be our final act in this vale of tears before we transcend these weak, fragile mortal shells. A million years of dreams shall be fulfilled through your skill, your strength, and your faith, and your rewards shall be limitless for it. Children of Origin, _will you follow me_?"

Matheon turned away as the cheers rose, staggering out of the door as needles of pain slid into his temples. His comrades turned to him, concern evident on their faces, but he waved them off. _Talk to someone. I have to... talk to someone._

The corridor outside was almost deserted – most of the crew were busy watching the broadcast. As a result, Matheon had an uninterrupted view of its structure, and what he saw was profoundly unsettling.

The inside of an Ori warship was an elegant marriage of form and function, seamlessly incorporating the symbols of Origin into its architecture without compromising utility or practicality. Every room was geometric perfection, a work of minimalist artistic beauty that did not waste a single square centimetre. Now, though, those perfect lines were subtly twisted if you looked at them from the right angle, the iconography was altered in a way that was almost, but not quite, blasphemous, and even the light had changed, casting troubling shadows where none had been previously. _I'm tired, it's all in my head, there has to be an explanation..._

He shook his head, continuing on, and yet his unease did not leave him. At times, in fact, it grew – when he passed the armoury, aglow with the burning runes decorating its new weapons, when he listened to the psalms in the Deck Six chapel, their familiar rhythms now indefinably unfamiliar, and when he overheard a pair of soldiers gossiping about the rebel attacks in the Ver Ilanth system. _Since when did we have rebels, anyway? What could they possibly be rebelling against?_

Eventually, he arrived on the ship's bridge. It was remarkably small and cramped for the nerve centre of an eleven-hundred-metre-long spacecraft, and held only the bare minimum of equipment and personnel required for safe, reliable manual piloting. The reason for this was sat in the control chair at the centre of the room, his glowing staff held upright in one wrinkled hand.

It was not, strictly speaking, true that Priors gave up their names after being chosen by the Ori for their position. Instead, their names simply became irrelevant next to the greater truth of their existence as priests of Origin, guides on the path to ascension, and instruments of the gods, gradually withering away through underuse until only the Prior remained.

That was not the only erosion of their individuality, either. Despite the fact that there were no official recruitment restrictions regarding age, race, or gender, most Priors tended to blur into each other after a while – pale old men in immaculate grey robes who all wore identical expressions of pious benevolence. The Prior captaining the _Blessed Flame _was no exception, and in fact was doing a particularly good job at being piously benevolent as Matheon approached him.

"How may I help you, my son?"

"Um... a minor matter, blessed Prior," Matheon replied, bowing his head. "If you have more pressing duties here, it need not concern you. I merely wished to speak to you if you had the time. To offer confession."

The old man's lined face crinkled into a smile. "Then you're in luck. Our patrol route has already been mapped out, and we will not be approaching hostile territory for another two days. Besides, what could be more important for a shepherd than tending to the needs of his flock? Lieutenant, I'm switching to manual. I'll be back in a bit."

The helmsman saluted. "Of course, my lord."

The light emanating from the Prior's staff died, and his chair leaned forward with a slow, gentle whine. Across the room, the bridge crew busied themselves with the controls at their stations, calling out sensor readings and navigational bearings to each other. Matheon moved forward, offering the priest his hand as he stood up.

"Ah, thank you, commander. To my quarters, then?"

"As you wish, blessed Prior." _See? It's fine. He's a Prior. He'll know the answers. Won't he?_

* * *

"So, my son, what did you want to talk about?"

The Prior's quarters were, as befitted his rank, the most spacious and opulent on the ship, but were curiously short on the personal touches that might indicate someone lived there. The only nods to individuality were the pair of low, expensive armchairs that he and Matheon were currently sitting in, and the elderly, heavily-annotated copy of the Book of Origin leaning against the end of one of the bookcases. Priors didn't have personal lives. That was sort of the point, really.

"To be honest with you, my lord, I'm not too comfortable with the direction the crusade's been taking."

The priest raised an eyebrow. "Oh? That _is_ serious. A loss of faith can be a terrible thing. So what is it that makes you so uncomfortable?"

"Well, lots of things, really. The new weapons. The new missions. The new prayers. The way I keep feeling that every time I turn around, one more tiny, infinitesimal thing will be different somehow. I understand the need for change, blessed Prior. We live in an ever-shifting universe, and we must adapt as well in order to best spread the word of Origin. This, though? This is too much, too fast. This is not the military I grew up with. This is not even the _faith_ I grew up with. Sometimes it feels like... no, I shouldn't."

"Please, proceed."

"It's foolish. You'll laugh, or worse, think I've gone mad. Perhaps I have."

The Prior smiled. "This is a confessional, commander. A way to unburden yourself from your doubts, your fears, and your sins. What value would it have if I were to mock you for what you feel?"

"Very well. It feels like... like our orders do not come from the Ori any more. That you, me, our civilisation as a whole... we're being manipulated somehow."

A wheezy chuckle. "Well, that's perfectly natural, commander. I believe that's the reaction you're supposed to have when you're being manipulated."

"I... beg your pardon?"

"Okay, technically, you're being manipulated twice over," the old man continued, blithely indifferent to the interesting colour that his guest's face was turning. "Of course, only the second one's particularly germane to our conversation at the moment. The second one's more in the way of background. Oh, I might as well tell you about that one anyway. There's been far too many lies in this universe already. We need a bit of truth to balance it out. Origin is a scam, commander. The Ori have never ascended another mortal, and they have no intention of starting any time soon. You're a pawn in an intergalactic confidence game, intended to provide a cabal of jumped-up godlings with all the power they could ever dream of."

Matheon's jaw slowly fell open. He could not have spoken if he wanted to.

"Incidentally, you're aware of the security mechanism the Ori have in place in case Priors go rogue? The spontaneous combustion triggered by blasphemous thought, word, and deed that ensures their ultimate purity? Of course you are. You were at Ver Kollath, you've seen it in action yourself. So why am I not a cinder on the floor right now? No, no, you don't have to answer yet. Just think about it. Independent thought is good. We need more of it around here."

The Prior snapped his fingers, and the Book of Origin on his shelf crumbled into dust, seemingly aging centuries in fractions of a second.

"Anyway, you've heard all this before, right? Nothing I've told you so far has been that far off from Tau'ri propaganda, and that means the Ori have a good number of answers for it. Very convenient, eh? Thing is, you have to admit that it makes a lot of sense anyway. If the Ori and Ancients can both derive power from worship, why are only the Ori doing it? Why haven't we seen temples to the Ancients, dark rituals and blasphemous faiths as far as the eye can see? I mean, they're evil, megalomaniacal monsters, aren't they? The Book of Origin says so. And yet who're the ones stampeding across the galaxy, forcing everyone they come across to convert or die? What evils have we seen the Ancients commit? What makes them worse than, say, us? Makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

"Enemies of the Ori will show no mercy in their attempt to lead us astray from the true path," Matheon quoted automatically, "and likewise we must attack with all the strength we have been given."

"Or, in other words, if a bunch of unarmed villagers tell us that Origin doesn't sound like their cup of tea, it's our moral obligation to slaughter them and torch their homes from orbit. Because they're clearly a serious threat to our millennia-old religion. Oh, don't tell me that never happens, we've both done it enough times to lose count. As a matter of fact, shouldn't you have shot me by now? I was under the impression that that's the done thing in these situations."

"W-well, yes, but... but you're a Prior," the commander croaked. "It'd just bounce off."

"Good point, but that's not the real reason, is it? Admit it, you're curious. You're wondering how the hell a Prior came to be spouting this gibberish. You're wondering which bit of the Book of Origin endorses changing prayerbooks, defacing holy symbols, and using our enemies' dark magic against them. You're wondering, in short, whether you've gone mad or everyone else has. Like I said, independent thought. Wonderful stuff. Well, commander, I'm pleased to tell you that it's the latter. And if you give me the time, I'll explain how and why, because the truth is a rare and precious thing, and I sincerely believe that you and this universe's other poor dupes deserve to hear it. Even if you don't listen, even if you don't want to believe me, it needs to be told. Oh, and I just accidentally-on-purpose rusted the door shut, so it's not like you've got much of a choice in the matter. Shall I continue, or would you like a bit of a break? I can get you a drink if you want."

Matheon did not answer. His headache had returned, along with a faint but very distracting nausea. _Maybe that fish I ate yesterday isn't agreeing with me? That would explain quite a lot, actually._

"So that stony silence is a 'please proceed, blessed Prior', then? Excellent. You see, the thing about the whole Ori conspiracy is that it's been going on for some time now. I mean, our entire civilisation is built on it, after all. The recent changes, though, are just that – recent. So what does the one have to do with the other? Simple. We've established that the Ori, hallowed be their name, are venal, power-hungry little gits. As a result, when someone dangles the promise of even more power under their proverbial noses, they'll leap on it like a fat kid on a bacon sandwich. You can see where I'm going with this, yes?"

"You're saying that the Ori are working with Chaos? _Consorting with our enemies_?" The backs of the commander's hands were starting to itch. He took off his gloves, and absent-mindedly scratched away.

"Oh, not intentionally. I think I've made it clear by now that the Ori aren't the world's greatest team players. But that doesn't mean they can't be steered. Guided. Manipulated. The technology we stole from the Tau'ri, the stuff Chaos had given to them... did you ever wonder why our copies have all those runes on them? Of course you didn't. That was the point."

The Prior gestured with his staff, and Matheon's holster burst open. His bulky hellpistol floated out, the runes on its casing sputtering fitfully as the priest caught it in one outstretched hand.

"Verses to sway the minds of those who look upon them," he continued, running his finger along the lines of alien script, "to lower suspicions, to subtly alter their decisions, and, eventually, to turn them into unknowing servants for a greater purpose. We never stole these weapons, commander – we were _given_ them. The blueprints were tainted, designed to near-invisibly alter our entire civilisation until we were nothing but an extension of their will. Didn't you wonder about the Stargates? Why the Ancients' ones shut down and ours didn't? Simple. We were useful. They weren't."

Matheon felt something give in his right hand and looked down, seeing an entire patch of skin caught on his fingernails. He tried to stand up, only for white-hot pain to lance through his joints as his vision swam drunkenly.

"Of course, there is such a thing as being _too_ useful. I mean, they're called Chaos, right? Strife and turmoil is their bread and butter, and the entire galaxy being brought under the Ori's heel wouldn't help much with that. So these runes are deliberately imperfect. They work most of the time, but sometimes... sometimes people wake up and smell the hellfire. That's where the rebels came from. Opposed to their fellow tools, and yet nonetheless tools themselves. Or, at least, that's what I was told. I've never actually met one before." A warm, genuine, and slightly regretful smile. "It's a real pleasure, commander, and for what it's worth, I'm sorry I had to do this."

The commander tried to speak, but could not. Bile was searing the back of his throat. He doubled over, letting out a noise halfway between a retch and a scream as his joints protested again and something inside him gave way.

There were black wisps drifting down in front of his eyes. It took him a moment to realise that they were his hair, and a moment more to realise that bits of his skin were still attached to them.

"Neither the Ori nor the Chaos Gods can be allowed to keep existing," the Prior continued. "They are parasites, causing unending suffering and giving nothing in return. There is not a single redeeming feature between them. And yet... and yet merely destroying them, wiping out their followers, erasing all memory of their existence... even that will not be enough to let the healing begin. They are merely symptoms of a greater disease. Both were born from mortals – the Ori were once men who dreamed of godhood, and Chaos, for all their otherworldly might, are nothing but fragments of our psyches made flesh. They are our children, our responsibility, and they are not alone. Can you tell me that humans would not slaughter each other without the Ori whispering into their minds? That they would not murder, rape, or steal without Chaos urging them on? The disease can be treated time and again, its tendrils driven back, but there is only one true cure, one final salvation for the multiverse. You should know what it is, commander. It's happening to you right now."

Matheon did not hear any of this. There was only the pain, the weariness, and the vague, disconnected feeling of betrayal. Then the dark came, and took everything else away.

* * *

The Prior waited until all movement had ceased, bent over, and closed the commander's wide, staring eyes. He spread his consciousness, watching the lights of his crew's souls fade as his contagion claimed them, and sighed. _I couldn't even tell them the truth first. I couldn't tell them why they had to die._

The door to his quarters presented no obstacle, exploding in a cloud of rust as his hand touched it. He returned to the bridge, drinking in the silence, with the weary, stumbling pace of a man who knew his journey was almost over.

The officers lay crumpled at their posts, their bodies already decaying. In a matter of hours, there would be nothing left of them but faint stains on their seats. The command chair hummed into life as he sat down in it, warning lights blinking across the insides of his eyes. He quelled them in moments, adjusting air-processers, fuel lines, and energy ratios with practiced ease, and keyed in a series of coordinates into the hyperdrive.

Earth. Home of the Tau'ri, the arrogant, backward tribe who dared to think of themselves and only themselves as 'human'. His master's chosen weapons, and the recipients of his final gift. _I hope they make good use of it._

The Prior made a few final checks. The systems were decrypted, the engines were stocked with more than enough fuel, and Adria's speech was recorded onto the bridge computers. The Tau'ri would be suspicious, of course, but there would be no way that they could resist such a vital opportunity, and for all that they were small, weak, and hopelessly ignorant, even the tiniest, most mindless bacterium could fell the greatest behemoth if introduced properly. He understood _that_ very well.

He thought back over his life – his family, long-abandoned, the worlds he had conquered, the civilisations he had slaughtered, and that final, transcendent moment when he had been shown the truth. None of it mattered any more. All lives, even those as long and sinful as his, must end, and in that ending he would find peace.

Jethras of Ver Isca, once a Prior of the Ori and now a disciple of the Lord of Decay, closed his eyes and let the plagues he carried devour him from within.

_It is done, Grandfather. Thanks to you, we die free. Every one of us dies free._

Thirty seconds later, the ship registered that it was no longer receiving signals from its command chair. It recorded this information in its automated log, along with the housekeeping requirements for Deck Nine, and continued onwards.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** So there you are. Our longest chapter yet. I believe I mentioned before that this is a single-divergence AU of the Open Door, and by now, I imagine that a fair few of you will have a pretty good idea of precisely what that divergence was.

Oh, and never let it be said that I forget a character, as much as others (especially said characters) might wish otherwise. I have plans. Great and terrible plans. Some of them even involve the continued plot of this story.

See you next time... and believe me, things are going to get messy. _Very_ messy.


	48. Back in Black

**47. Back in Black**

There were very few seats in the known multiverse in which a Space Marine Primarch could sit comfortably. There were none in which he could sit comfortably whilst wearing full Terminator armour.

It was not, strictly speaking, necessary for Primarch Toji Suzuhara to wear the armour. He was in friendly territory, surrounded by his own side's soldiers, and generally as safe as anyone could be within Chaos's fledgling empire. Nevertheless, in the months since he'd taken command of the Bloodhaven facility, he'd developed an unfortunate itch between the shoulderblades whenever he went unarmoured… and when you were a three-metre-tall bioengineered colossus, that translated to a _lot_ of itching.

So it was that several tonnes of adamantium-plated, gently whirring Primarch were squeezed into the crew compartment of one of the battleship _New Syracuse_'s ground-to-orbit shuttles, the reinforced bench creaking ominously beneath him as the overhanging hunchback of the suit's powered exoskeleton scraped bright metallic trails in the paintwork of the ceiling. It was not a sight to encourage small talk, or indeed any activity unrelated to getting as much space between oneself and the big scary monster-man as was humanly possible… which was why the person sitting next to him was experimentally rapping on his left pauldron with her knuckles.

"Hey, is that real adamantium? For personal armour? Hot damn, chief, where'd you get enough power output to even lift that stuff?"

Toji looked down and to the side, meeting the keen, interested, and distressingly enthusiastic gaze of Admiral Rong-Arya. _Ah, yes. _That's _why I was wearing the suit._

Toji was not especially prejudiced against daemons – he couldn't be, really, given that he was married to one. Furthermore, he was quite aware of the contributions that Rong-Arya in particular had made to their understanding of the multiverse – and, more recently, to shoring up their defences now that most of the rest of said multiverse was out to get them. Even so, he could not help but find her a bit… well… _creepy_, and spending the last few days in her company whilst they made the trip from Earth to Bloodhaven had not improved matters in the slightest. Spending the past fifteen minutes in a cramped, uncomfortable shuttle with her and a team of three Marines who didn't know how to keep their elbows to themselves had done even less to soften his feelings, and the generous dose of Warp-lag he was working off hadn't helped either.

"There's a pair of microfusion reactors in the backpack section," he explained, trying not to sound annoyed at the unwanted physical contact. "The techs wanted to try one of their new antimatter plants to cut down on the bulk, but I wasn't mad on having a three-megaton bomb strapped to my spine. Sorry, admiral. This armour's still too big to be anything other than a Space Marine exclusive."

The daemonhost shrugged. "Eh, no problem. So long as your lot ship out enough to keep my fleet plated up, I'm happy as a clam. Seriously, that stuff is amazing. We'd had it on the _Stiletto_ when we ran into the Cylons, we wouldn't even have had a bit of suntan to show off to the folks back home. Guess that's how it goes when you're stuck with just the one measly little star system to poke around in. Still, we're almost done with that, right? Once the Stargates fire up – bam. No more C'tan, and we get our own universe back. Can't wait."

"Yep, should be nice," Toji replied, half-listening. "To explore strange new worlds, to discover new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no-one has gone before… who do you think they're going to ask us to backstab first, you reckon?"

The room went very, very quiet, the question hanging in the air like an orbiting warship. _Oh shit, did I say that out loud?_

"I… beg your pardon, sir?" Rong-Arya asked carefully.

_Sod it, there's only five other people here. Two of those are servitors, and three are my very own brainwashed goons. At the end of the day, who's going to give a crap?_ "You heard me, admiral. In your professional opinion, which new civilisation we discover are my old buddies from Tokyo-3 going to want to betray first? It does, after all, seem to be our standard first-contact policy."

"Hey, we didn't do it to _all_ of-" the admiral began.

"There's not much to do around here," Toji cut in. "Bloodhaven's a pretty quiet place, and stuff like processing adamantium shipments from the stealth miners, supervising defence construction, mapping the geography… that's mostly about sitting around waiting, with only an occasional bit of activity thrown in. So we get bored, and bored people get curious. We pick up a whole load of local transmissions, you know that? Told us a great deal. Like the funny little coincidence that _someone_ leaked our technology to the Ori just after the orbital manufactoria back home went online, and we no longer needed to trade with the folks in this universe to arm ourselves. Convenient, wasn't it, that this place had the decency to only collapse into mayhem after it was no longer useful to us?"

Rong-Arya shrugged. "Yeah, that sounds like the gods' M.O., all right. Your point being?"

"Wait – you don't see anything wrong with that?"

"Not really." The admiral's expression softened. "Look, chief, this was your only intervention, right? First time you've seen what we generally do to a universe? Me, I've run two myself, seen the consequences of a couple more, and read the files on another three. As a good rule of thumb, if the gods want a civilisation destabilised, the bastards have it coming."

Toji simply raised an eyebrow.

"OK, so you don't believe me. Let's run down the list, shall we? First, we've got the Alpha Quadrant crowd. The Federation, the Cardassians, and so on. Now, I've gone on way the fuck too often about what happened to little Cassie's people, so let me switch gears and tell you about this world called Bajor. A few subjective decades ago, the Cardassians took over, and… well, you remember all those history lessons back in school, about the shit that Nazi Germany and your own delightful ancestors in Imperial Japan pulled in the twentieth century? They applied that on a _planetary_ scale. The Bajorans were enslaved, forced to wait on their overlords hand and foot and asshole whilst dissidents, deviants, and anyone the Cardassian Union just plain didn't like were herded off to death-camps the size of cities. The resistance begged for the Federation to do something, _anything_, and what did the shining beacon of the Quadrant do? They sat around and passed the popcorn whilst stuff that made the Rape of Nanking look like a minor lovers' tiff was going down right in front of their eyes, and then when the Cardassians finally pulled out, they moved over to Bajor like nothing had happened. Hey there, see your civilisation's in shambles, now do you want to take a look at this nice, cheap, mass-produced dreck we scraped off the bottom of our replicators?"

A muffled, distant roar shuddered up through the deck, increasing gradually in volume as the shuttle breached Bloodhaven's rudimentary, physics-confounding atmosphere. The endless, swirling sea of polychromatic clouds beneath them took on a faint, reddish tint through the armaplas windows, wisps of fire flicking past in the blink of an eye.

"Or, hey, how about the Praxis? You know what they called one of their warships? There was this one ship, right, that had an all-human crew. They made especially sure of that, to make a point. And the captain – every captain, in this ship's century-long history – was Indian. Hand-picked for exactly that ship. Anyway, you know what it was called? The _Bombardment of Delhi_. It went around dropping antimatter bombs on rebels, and filming the after-effects for twenty-four-hour entertainment channels. I wish I was making this shit up."

"Even so-" Toji began.

"Even so _what_? There is nothing – _nothing_ – that we have done to these people that they haven't either done or let happen a thousand times over. Even were we to burn their worlds to the bedrock, salt what is left of the earth, and erase every memory of their existence, it would still not be equal to the concentrated weight of their malice, apathy, and petty loathsomeness. We're just giving them a little taste of what they've been dishing out, that's all."

"Not everyone seems to agree with you on that," the Primarch pointed out mildly.

"The Bureau and their buddies? Don't make me laugh. You saw the intelligence reports – hell, I showed them to you. No, forget that, just look at those pompous assholes' _title_. They've appointed themselves the administrators of time and space in its entirety, and they've got the power to back it up. Their total fleet strength outnumbers ours a hundredfold. Their grunt soldiers can punch through walls with their bare hands, shrug off anti-tank rounds, and shoot energy blasts from their faces. So I ask you, what the fuck have they been _doing_ with all of that? Where were they when the Cardassians were tearing Bajor a new rectum? When the Praxis were torturing entire populations to death on public TV? When a thousand other, worse atrocities were happening right in their own, self-appointed back yard? You ever want to know what's wrong with this multiverse? What's _really_ wrong with it? Watch one of those smug, sanctimonious fuckwads claim to be the guardians of everything whilst shit like that is going on right under their noses. Don't kid yourself, chief – the reason the Bureau is after us has nothing to do with morality or ethics. We're a threat to them. That's it. Plain old rat-bastard self-preservation. And frankly, if that's the kind of enemy we're making here, I'm pretty OK with that."

She fished a cigarette out of her jacket pocket, held it into the sorcerous fire emanating from her eyes until it caught alight, and took a long, slow drag.

"'Sides, I don't see why it matters much either way. I mean, all of this is temporary. That's why you're here, right?"

"Wait – what do you mean by that?"

This time, it was Rong-Arya's turn to look surprised. "Wait, you don't know? They never told you what the Stargate Project's all about? Warp's teeth, aren't you supposed to be _running_ that thing?"

Toji's lip curled. "'Supposed to be' is exactly right. Ever since they set up the labs around that gate, information's been strictly need-to-know – and apparently, I don't. Even Alicia clams up every time I ask."

His daemonhost companion's eyes narrowed. "Well, that's not exactly fair, is it? Ye gods, chief, did you actually think we were planning on leaving those universes we've hit the way they are? No wonder you've been having second thoughts. I doubt it's a big deal, though – probably just an administrative oversight. I mean, they told _me_, after all."

"And would you care to share?" Toji asked drily. _Gods, just how far out of the loop am I?_

"Sure thing." She glanced over to the shuttle's other passengers. "Protocol Alpha-Twelve. You guys, you heard _nothing_."

The Marines twitched in their seats, eyes rolling back and faces slackening as the implanted trigger-phrase took hold. Rong-Arya took another puff of the cigarette, and then stubbed it out against the nearest super-soldier's knee-pad.

"Got those from a Mislaatite pleasure-cult on the _New Syracuse_. Not normally my kinda thing, but they're pretty more-ish. Also utterly lethal to any unaugmented human within five metres, but hey, that's not a big deal for folks like us, right? Yeah, yeah, I know, the Stargate thing. OK, here's what I remember. Our primary objective's to get rid of the C'tan, yeah? Can't fight them as we are, so we have to… ah… _borrow_ stuff from other universes to stand a chance. Thing is, when me and the _Stiletto_ set out, it soon became apparent that the rest of the multiverse is in a bit of a state. Kicking the C'tan's metal asses is all well and good, but if we have to ignore the shit that everyone else is in to accomplish it… nah. Not going to happen. And guess what? The gods agreed with me."

"Go on."

"The problem is, though, that most of these universes… they've been like they are for a long time. The corruption, the cruelty, the injustice… it's all rooted in pretty deep. Trying to work within the system and use the existing tools to fix the problem won't work, because the system is _part_ of the problem. To achieve real, lasting change, you have to burn it all down and start again."

"Well, I'm seeing a lot of burning down," Toji said. "Not so much of the second bit."

"Precisely, and that's because the second bit is the tricky bit. The expensive bit. To rebuild an entire universe, better than before… you're going to need divine intervention. And that's where the Stargate Project comes in. The precise metaphysics escape me, but basically, it's a power source, designed to channel energy from hundreds of universes straight to the gods, giving them enough juice to usher in a new golden age of humanity wherever we've prepared the path for them. That's what you're building, chief – a tool to reshape the multiverse. Cool, huh?"

The Primarch was silent for a moment. "You're… sure about this?"

"Completely. Got it right from the horse's mouth soon after I came back. Lord Tzintchi was absolutely delighted with what I'd been doing. Couldn't wait to tell me." She looked almost indecently pleased at this.

One of the side-benefits of being a Primarch was a certain affinity for sorcery, and under Alicia's slightly scatter-brained tuition, Toji had picked up a few tricks. One of them was empathy – the ability to detect minds within a certain area, to read surface emotions, and, most importantly, to tell whether someone was lying to him. Rong-Arya was not. _Holy hell._

Toji stared out of the window. The cloud-layer had reacted to their presence, splitting apart and reaching long, probing tendrils upwards to brush at the interloper. Daemons swarmed around the brightly-coloured ribbons of vapour, underlit by the clouds' gentle glow. A broad swathe of dull, red earth was visible through the breach, and, at its centre, a broad, shallow crater thirty kilometres across, ringing a ten-kilometre-wide mass of low, armoured buildings, the twin spires of their void shield generators probing up into the heavens.

Carmine Hollow. An impregnable fortress. The staging ground for every excursion from inside the Wall since the fall of the Suzumiyaverse. Home to over a million mortal souls, plus twenty Evangelions, two thousand Space Marines, and innumerable daemons and clone-bred servitors, with more arriving every week. _And also, apparently, the salvation of the multiverse._

_Shinji, you've got a lot of questions to answer._

He leaned back in his seat, ignoring the screech of his armour as it scraped against the ceiling again. "By the way, admiral, I was meaning to ask. After we pulled our TSAB recruits from active duty, didn't you request that some of them be handed over to you? What happened to them?"

Rong-Arya's fangs gleamed in the alien light. "Education."

He could have used his truthsense then. He chose not to. There were some questions in the multiverse that he wasn't too keen on getting the answers to.

Her smile broadened, and he knew she thought him weak.

* * *

The shuttle's ramp settled into the firm, spongy surface of the landing pad, a slight bruise spreading across the ground. Bloodhaven had been more active lately, sculpting its own surface to better defend its inhabitants, and the side-effects were still visible. The reddish-brown soil had taken on a distinctly fleshlike tone, droplets of blood welling out whenever a Chaos earth-mover cut into it, whilst the distant ridge of the crater's rim gleamed pale and bright in the clouds' weird alien light, resembling polished bone as much as rock.

Toji stepped out, Rong-Arya and the Marines following a moment later. The entire First Company of the Sons of Toji were waiting for them, their black armour shining like the carapaces of a hundred oversized, heavily-armed beetles. Leading them were the four Marines comprising the Primarch's honour guard, heads bowed and weapons presented for inspection.

The honour guard were signs of the gods' favour, hand-picked from each of their patron Chapters. Anatole Gianakopulos of the Bearers, tall, spindly, and insectile, with the long-handled flail that appeared to be part of his arm, Pyotr Nureyev of the Whips, barely visible behind the cloud of living incense that coiled tightly around him like a blanket, Zhang Liu of the Heralds, the ward-parchments on his armour rustling in a nonexistent wind… and Sophie Deneuve of the Reavers, her blunt features reshaped a dozen times over by her Chapter's ritual scarring.

No one knew why the Emperor of Mankind, the brilliant 41st-milennium bioengineer who had created the Marines, had decided that they should all be male. Theories ranged from Master Fleshcrafter Tikolo's staggeringly complex exploration of irreconcilable biological differences, which drew upon evidence like the different ways in which high levels of oestrogen and testosterone interacted with geneseed secretions, to Admiral Rong-Arya's elegantly simple 'he was a misogynistic fuckwad' thesis, which drew upon evidence like the original Marines' companion organisation, an all-female anti-psyker unit who wore impractically figure-hugging armour, preferred to be seen and not heard, and had a distressingly high mortality rate.

Whatever the truth, Asukhon had decided that this state of affairs was unacceptable, and set an extraordinary number of scientists towards finding a way for female recruits to join her Reavers. The project had apparently not been quite as successful as they might have hoped, which was why the other Space Marine Chapters remained all-male, but Toji had certainly found nothing to complain about in the combat performance of the Reaver battle-sisters under his command. He did sometimes wonder why Deneuve insisted on lugging around her enormous sniper-pattern rail rifle when her Chapter was so monomaniacally fond of close-quarters combat, but after seeing her pick off the targets on the Hollow's firing ranges from the parade ground four miles away, it wasn't something that he considered especially relevant.

He looked out over his assembled subordinates, and started counting down in his head.

"Primarch," Deneuve said in her flat, nasal voice, "welcome home. We await your command."

"At ease, lieutenant. Anything interesting happen whilst I was away?"

"We've picked something up on the long-range sensors," Liu replied. "Could just be another Warp-storm, but-"

"TOJI!"

Something small and pale in a long, black cloak barrelled into his midriff, his armour's shock absorbers squealing at the impact. He reached down, scooping it up with one massive arm. _Five. Earlier than I'd expected._

"Morning, Alicia. How's it going?"

"Toji I've missed you so much it was so boring around here but we're almost done and did you get me any presents did you-"

"Hey, slow down there, we've got plenty of time to chat about stuff. No need to get it all out at once." He frowned. "Wait, what happened to your face?"

Long, curling scars trailed across Alicia's cheeks and forehead, describing intricate, regular patterns across her too-white skin. As Toji looked more closely, he saw more of them coiling up her arms into the short, baggy sleeves of her Barrier Jacket, seeming to writhe and undulate before his eyes.

"Oh, those? Neat, aren't they?" The child-mage giggled. "I was going to show you. The Stargate stuff was getting really complicated, and I was kind of falling behind. It wasn't my fault – fabricating trans-dimensional energy matrices is really tough, and Papa Tzintchi says I'm better at it than anyone – but I didn't want to let him or Mama Asukhon down, so I asked Lieutenant Liu what sorts of tricks he's learnt to boost his spells. You see those parchments he's wearing? They're runic scripts to store and focus Warp-energy. Really cool, but I thought he was making it too complicated. Don't scold him, Toji, it's what Papa Tzintchi's people are supposed to do, right?" She smiled at the Marine sorcerer, who managed to twist his mouths into something resembling a nervous grin. "I mean, why bother with armour and paper when you can just carve it into your skin?"

_Why indeed._ Toji shot a baleful gaze at Liu, who looked appropriately shamefaced. Alicia didn't notice.

"So yeah, it hurt, but I felt _sooo_ much better afterwards. It's the blood, you see? Mama Asukhon was right. It all comes down to blood in the end. I wonder if I should show her? What do you think, Toji?"

To Toji's infinite relief, it was then that the base's alarms went off.

* * *

The blowfish glared at Toji accusingly as the hatch descended between them, its bulging eyes promising an eternity of torment for his sins against fishkind. There was a horrible, organic sound, and the device's screen flickered into life.

"You're sure, then?" he asked.

The senior tech-priest nodded, his bionic eyes dilating. "It's why we rang the bell, sir. See that big red blotch in the top-left corner? Look closer – it's granular, lots of little dots all clumped together. If it were a natural anomaly, like a Warp-storm, we'd see a blurred, unified mass. Spilled milk, not sugar, if you follow me. Those dots are _engines_, thousands of them. It's an invasion fleet, the biggest I've ever seen, and it's headed our way."

Toji peered at the screen. _Guess you can't see the torches and pitchforks at this distance. _"We got an ETA?"

"Two weeks, give or take time-distortion effects from the Warp. One week until we can start picking out and classifying individual ships. I've been meaning to say, sir, this is some amazing tech. We really appreciate having it to play around with."

The Primarch shrugged tectonically. "Whatever gets the job done. Hey, Nureyev, how long until we can pick up intel from our agents on that fleet? The gods' purges didn't get _all_ of them, right?"

"You'd be correct, sir." The Mislaatite lieutenant's silken voice positively flowed down the line. "By our estimates, the Bureau complement alone has over two dozen Divine Assassins on board, plus a hundred or so suborned operatives smart enough to figure out a basic messenger ritual. We think most of them are still loyal, too – either Lord Tzintchi's daemons missed them altogether, or they just aren't holding a grudge. Normally, we'd be able to call them right now, just like our embedded agents back in enemy territory, but Warp-travel cuts down the range of our communications somewhat. Should be hearing from them in two days."

_Two dozen? We sent hundreds of Divines to Bureau space. Warp's teeth…_ Toji wasn't sure why the gods had decided to exterminate the Divine Assassin and Hellhound agents they had seeded in enemy territory. He just hoped they'd had a good enough reason to warrant crippling their foreign intelligence network. Sighing inaudibly to himself, he re-opened his armour's comm-link with a thought.

"Nureyev, I'm heading over to Ops. We've only got fourteen days left, and I want to make sure that we give our new friends a nice, warm welcome."

_Even if I can't blame them for what they're doing._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yes, the Doorstop is back, in the colour of your choosing. You may detect a certain theme in this new block of chapters, and it's here to stay for the remainder of the Bloodhaven arc, because I just can't resist a terrible pun. Or, for that matter, poking the notorious 'female Space Marine' anthill – as a member of the old Black Library forums, I have fond memories of the screaming matches _that_ caused.

And no, no blowfish were harmed during the making of this chapter. Well... maybe a couple.


	49. Dancing in the Dark

**48. Dancing in the Dark**

The trip to Bloodhaven was not as fast this time – hardly surprising, since the _Eventide_ now had a few thousand other ships hanging off its backside. Nevertheless, the voyage was proceeding reasonably well.

To Hayate's mild surprise, their Alpha Quadrant allies had agreed to continue with the mission after the fiasco with the Spiral Driver intelligence leak. No one was under any illusion that it was a gesture of respect, though – they apparently just felt that the Bureau couldn't be trusted to drive out Chaos on their own. The Federation and Klingons had purposely distanced themselves from fleet strategy meetings (though the Aldebaran Alliance had remained oddly enthusiastic), and it wasn't quite clear which chain of command they would be operating under when the shooting started. _I'm just glad it's not my problem to deal with._

It was said that Fleet Admiral Thundra had taken to the bottle again, but Hayate privately doubted it. That would require him to have given it up in the first place.

Nevertheless, fate (with a small f) seemed insistent on _making_ the ever-expanding diplomatic quagmire at the heart of Operation Guardian her problem. Leeron had been assigned to her ship as a technical supervisor, under the pretext that he would be most comfortable with the ship that had brought him from the Spiral Nation in the first place. Yuki Nagato had shown up as their liaison with the Integrated Data Entity, accompanied by a squad of time-traveller marines led by Itsuki Koizumi, and Yuuno had arrived on board half an hour before they left Vaizen, glancing around nervously as Arf hauled along a trolleyful of massive grimoires behind him.

In other words, the three people at the heart of two of the biggest diplomatic disputes in the alliance were on board the lightly-defended scout ship that had fired the first shots of the war, and was likely to be leading the first wave in the attack on Bloodhaven. Hayate didn't believe in coincidences. Not ones like that. Thundra probably wasn't at fault, though – it wasn't his style – and Lindy… well, that was just unthinkable. She thought back to her conversation with Yuuno in the White Dragon. _You were right. We didn't get everyone three years ago. Some of them are right here in this fleet._

That, of course, brought her attention back to the _other_ events of that… memorable evening. _No, not the time for that. Not now, not ever. At least he hasn't brought it up yet. Maybe he doesn't remember? We both had quite a bit to drink…_

_But what if he does remember? What happens then?_

Hayate had a problem, and the problem was this – she was twenty-three years old, and had never been in anything resembling a romantic relationship. Most of her teenage years had been occupied by TSAB officer training, where the closest thing to burning youthful passion had been the occasional doddering, half-senile general trying to look down her shirt. It was said that between the hours-long drills, bewildering theory exams, and interminable lectures, some people had managed to eke out a rudimentary social life. It was also said that two of Mid-Childa's moons were made out of congealed mozzarella. She was more inclined to believe the latter.

_Perhaps I should ask some of my friends? They seemed to manage well enough._

She reviewed her options. Nanoha's advice she could already predict, and immediately ruled out – unleashing that level of magical firepower in confined quarters would severely jeopardise both the mission and her ship's hull integrity. Besides, Yuuno might get the wrong idea. Shamal was, of course, completely out of the question, and she had to suppress a shudder at the thought. Asking Signum could go one of two ways – either she'd go as pink as her hair whilst hurriedly explaining that advising her mistress on her love-life was not one of her functions, or she'd suggest something absolutely ghastly like presenting him with a hundred enemy foreskins (and where were you supposed to get that many foreskins at short notice, anyway? Was there a catalogue or something?). Asking Amy for tips so soon after her husband's death seemed like the height of poor taste. Finally, there was Zafira. _Ah, yes, he's with Arf now, isn't he? If you can call that 'being with'. Maybe some 'what not to do' tips?_

Her finger hovered over the call button to her Guardian Beast's quarters for a moment, but eventually her conscience prevailed. _Guess I'm on my own, then._

She turned to her paperwork, hoping to distract herself – and immediately wished she hadn't. The crew roster loomed in front of her, a list of over a hundred people. Roughly one-third of them were completely unfamiliar.

It would have been impossible to ignore the casualties that the First had taken – especially if you were their commanding officer – but seeing it displayed so bluntly was something else. She could almost fill in the gaps – that berth had once belonged to Private Clio, eviscerated by a Hellhound during the battle for the central office's life-support centre, whilst the one next to it had been occupied by Sergeant Xige before he was forcibly escorted to a psychiatric hospital on Fedikia. To put it simply, they had been chewed up and spat out, and now they were going back in.

_That's why they brought such a big fleet, isn't it? To absorb all the losses we're going to take._

When the Bureau got into a fight, its foremost priority was to minimise the casualties on both sides. Diplomacy tended to be less messy than warfare, and if diplomacy wasn't an option, the combat mages' job was to wade in and cool some heads until it _became_ an option. Consequently, the number of people who died in such situations tended to be very low. The Scaglietti Incident had resulted in roughly a hundred deaths. The Mariage case had resulted in three hundred, mostly because the dead kept getting back up and stabbing people. The Varduk Prime Massacre, their worst disaster in recent decades, had barely topped a thousand.

The Chaos invasion had killed three billion people and counting.

It was, simply, a meaningless amount. The human mind was not equipped to process numbers that big, and no human government was equipped to take those kinds of losses into account. She suspected, though, that the Bureau was even less equipped than most. _We're not going to survive this, are we? Not as a civilisation. Not as we were before._

Shamal had arranged regular therapy sessions for the crew following the battle of Mid-Childa. With the workload involved in preparing for the Bloodhaven operation, Hayate had not been able to attend one in weeks.

She scrolled through the roster, her fingers moving mechanically across the display. Far away, an alarm chimed. The first phase had begun.

* * *

"Hold on," the tech-priest said. "That's weird."

Thirteen days had passed since his return, and Toji had been awake for all of it. Marines didn't need to sleep in the normal manner – they could shut half their brains down at a time and keep going as they were. For the enhanced models known as Primarchs, it was more like a quarter, and even then they required less time dormant overall.

He had mostly been occupied with putting the finishing touches on Carmine Hollow's defences – positioning the zombie pens, mapping out lines of fire from the fortress-city's gun batteries, and explaining to an ascended Mislaatite daemon from the nineteenth century that 'roger that' was an acknowledgement, not a request. Every few hours, though, he stopped by the primary sensor complex to check on the enemy's progress, which had proven rather more difficult than expected. The prediction of individual ship classifications had proven over-optimistic, the colossal mass of ships comprising the allied fleet remaining frustratingly indistinct, and the tech-priests suspected deliberate interference. Now, though, it seemed they had struck gold.

"What is?" he asked, leaning over the screen.

"The fleet. You see? It looks like they're… splitting."

It was true. The blotch representing the allied ships was elongating and collapsing inward at the middle, like an amoeba that had just decided it wanted to be in two minds about something. One half was smaller and brighter, the other broader and duller.

He blipped his comm-unit. "Nureyev, we've got something. Any noise from our agents?"

The lieutenant's reply was as swift and crisp as if he'd only woken up an hour ago. "They'll be in range in forty minutes, sir."

"Roger that. Diaz, have you mapped their trajectories?"

"One moment, sir," the tech-priest replied. "There we go. The big group's still heading for us, on the same course as before. The small one, though? They're headed for the Suzumiyaverse gap, but the angle's kind of oblique – they'll be scraping the very edge of the opening. Sir… it'll take them to our universe. They're headed for Earth."

* * *

The Carmine Hollow operations room was never supposed to be terribly elaborate – just a low concrete box with enough sensors, tactical/strategic forecasting, and communications equipment crammed into it to coordinate the defence of an entire planet. Nobody was quite sure where the vaulting had come from. Or the gargoyles. Or the spikes. In any building operated by Chaos, there appeared to be a mandatory minimum requirement of gothic, and if the architects weren't obliging enough to provide it, the structure itself would make… arrangements.

Toji had lost thirteen construction workers to predatory transepts whilst building the city. It was far from the strangest entry on the Hollow's list of casualties.

They had pulled apart some of the smaller consoles in preparation for the morning's activities, and set up a small summoning circle in the resulting space – a flayed human skin surrounded by an intricate arrangement of carefully-sliced organs, their reddish-grey flesh pulsating as if still alive. The raw materials had, of course, been vat-grown, deliberately imperfect clones, without sufficient neural development to feel or even conceptualise pain. Over the months since they had set up shop, the Bloodhaven detail had become quite skilled in humane sacrifice.

Toji had assembled all his senior officers for his briefing – Admiral Rong-Arya, the four Marines of his honour-guard, General Huang and his unaugmented human staff, Magos Diaz from the sensors department, and a twitching, eyeless lump of meat that served as Princeps Stahlheim's avatar.

"So what's this about, then?" the latter growled, the lips of its mouth-cavity narrowly failing to sync up with the words. "We know the enemy's out there – why isn't little miss daemonhost chasing after them already?"

Toji winced. Stahlheim commanded the planet's Evangelion detachment, and whilst there were numerous criteria that one had to meet before being wired into a forty-metre-tall death-machine, possessing a basic measure of tact was not one of them.

Rong-Arya, however, simply smiled. "It's simple, my lord princeps. We know something's out there, but we don't know who, what, or how many of them, and 'little miss daemonhost' would prefer to find out before sending her fleet halfway across the multiverse to chase after them. We can't ignore a threat to our homeworld, sure, but that's one of two fleets, and whatever we send after them won't be able to get back here before the second fleet hits _this_ system and starts scratching the paintjobs on those shiny Evas of yours. And we can't have that, can we? Not after all the time you spent on them."

Their commander held up a hand. "Easy, you two. The admiral's right – we need more intelligence about what we're up against. Diaz, you ready?"

The red-robed priest saluted as best his modified physique would allow. "We're all spun up, sir. They should enter range and start broadcasting in three… two… one."

A loud crack echoed across the room as the static discharge began, oddly-coloured lightning leaping across the summoning circle. A moment later, the flayed hide's stretched, flattened face twitched, its lips flapping out strange, alien syllables.

Diaz nodded. "We're linked, sir. Getting the data now. Mostly stuff we already know – ship performance, squadron sizes, and the like – but there are some interesting discrepancies. Either they switched things around a bit since they left port, or there are hidden shipyards en route that we don't know about. I'm betting a bit of both."

"That _is_ interesting. Run an analysis on their course and logistical histories – see if you can backtrace where those yards might be. Do we have any positional data yet?"

"That's a negative, sir – not only are they failing to tell us anything, but I can't even trace their locations from the signals. I can give you numbers – we've got roughly a hundred broadcasters, almost the full complement – but that's it. They haven't even mentioned the split yet."

"Everyone broadcasting at once?" Rong-Arya asked. "Isn't that kind of sloppy?"

"Only if they stood a chance of being intercepted and traced," Stahlheim replied with what Toji thought to be unnecessary smugness. "The messaging ritual was designed by Lord Tzintchi himself. It's totally undetectable."

The admiral's face registered doubt, but she kept her mouth closed. The gods were usually quite relaxed about blasphemy, but 'usually' was very much the operative word.

"She's got a point," Toji said, pretending not to notice her triumphant glance at the princeps. "Diaz, see if you can get some of these guys to switch off – at the very least, we don't need so many people yelling down the line at once. Oh, and try to call up one of 'em on an audio feed. Let's get some questions answered."

"Roger that, sir."

The face in the summoning circle bulged outwards, assuming normal human proportions. Its empty eyelids blinked, and it cleared its non-existent throat.

"This is Corporal Brougham, TSAB vessel _Flame of Ruwella_. Who am I speaking to, please?"

"Primarch Toji Suzuhara, Bloodhaven defence force. Any idea about your location, corporal? We're trying to figure out who went where after your fleet split."

The eyeholes widened. "M-my lord! Sorry, I wasn't aware I'd be talking to someone quite so illustrious. You say our fleet… split? That'd explain a lot. I'm Army, not Navy, I'm afraid, and we've been stuck in the passenger bays for a week now. The ship's gone completely silent – no external images, no communications, and when we get a chance to talk to the Navy boys, they seem just as confused as we are. Sorry I can't help you more, my lord."

Stahlheim's avatar hawked up a luminous gobbet of phlegm. "Well, that one's a bust. You, priest, cut the-"

"Hold on a second," Toji interjected. "Corporal, can you tell us more about this blackout?"

"Sure. Like I said, it… huh? The lights went out. Why did the lights go out?"

_Oh, shit._ "Brougham, break off. Break off and get out of there _now_."

"Wait, my lord, what's- _gnaaaghhh_…"

The sacrificial circle writhed, convulsed, and flew apart, scattering Warp-fire and dead flesh across the room. Most of it landed on the towering Primarch.

A hush fell across the operations room, punctuated by the slow, insistent dripping of something unnameably organic. Slowly, deliberately, Rong-Arya lit another cigarette.

"'Totally undetectable', huh?"

Toji gingerly wiped his face, trying not to speculate about the sticky goop that clung to the back of his gauntlet. At least, he thought, Stahlheim had the decency to look embarrassed.

* * *

The smiling blonde girl withdrew her fingers from Corporal Brougham's forehead, the skin perfectly reforming as his corpse slowly, inelegantly fell over. The _Flame of Ruwella_'s dull red emergency lighting was ideally suited to conceal a multitude of unpleasantnesses, but in this case, it did not have to make the effort. The whole process had been both remarkably clean and disappointingly brief.

The process by which living organisms ceased functioning was a quite fascinating source of data, after all. She would clearly have to revisit it at some point.

The Humanoid Interface waved a hand, and the dead spy disintegrated, a layer of near-invisible dust setting across the room. _Our source's information was accurate. I have isolated and identified the signal. Details are as follows. All units, cross-reference with sensor logs and eliminate any entities that broadcast along this frequency within the past day._

She paused a few nanoseconds. _Be sure to record the details of the terminations. It will be a useful addition to the Data Integration Thought Entity's archives._

It would also, she reflected, be a useful addition to her own private files. This voyage had certainly not been short on interesting new experiences.

* * *

"So what went wrong then?" Rong-Arya asked.

Diaz spread his hands. "Inside job. Had to be. Stahlheim was right – those transmissions should have been totally undetectable. Those Humanoid Interface thingies are good, but they'd still need to know where to look first. For the record, that's also why I want to quarantine and delete all the data we got from our fleet assets."

"Oh?" Toji raised an eyebrow. "Go ahead, but what's the reasoning?"

"The communication ritual uses conceptual encryption. Basically, you don't just have to know the steps you need to carry out to receive, transmit, or modify a message – you have to have the right sort of personality type and mindset as well. That's pretty handy if someone stumbles over your line by accident, like, say, if a telepath gets a headache in the wrong place at the wrong time – even if they pick up on it, they won't be able to make any sense of it. It'd just be background noise. Thing is, that's not what happened here. The bad guys played it smart and methodical, systematically shutting off signals across the EM and metaphysical spectra until they could isolate and trace ours. Not only that, but the timing suggests they had a rough idea of the ritual's maximum range. The conceptual encoding means that they couldn't have ripped the instructions out of the head of one of our agents. Our boy had to brief them of his own free will, and if he told them that, it stands to reason that he told them everything else as well... including how to edit our messages. Even if the data we got isn't loaded to the gills with viruses, it's probably been tampered with enough to be worse than useless. Sorry, sir – don't think we're going to find out about those other shipyards after all."

The Primarch swore quietly. "Any idea how many people we lost?"

"Estimates only. I'd managed to get about half of the broadcasters to switch off by the time they got Brougham, but the Humanoid Interfaces are basically living recording devices. It'd be trivially easy for them to go over the data and hunt down anyone they missed the first time. We might get a bit of use out of the ones smart enough to keep their heads down once we engage them with our own fleet – some minor sabotage, maybe – but otherwise, it's a total loss."

"So we're still blind, then," Rong-Arya stated calmly. "Orders, chief?"

Toji paused for a moment. For all that they followed the self-styled Gods of Chaos, it was actually quite rare for Earth's military to be put into a position where they had to take risks. The Impacts had halved their population and ravaged their planet, leaving them as a fragile, fledgling empire that only got into fights it was absolutely, positively sure it would win. Then this war had started, for reasons he still didn't fully understand, and suddenly things weren't nearly so safe any more. He had zero information and a limited timeframe, and if he made the wrong choice, thousands of people could die. At minimum. _I never asked for this, Shinji, you know that? I never asked for this._

_But then again, I never said 'no', either._

"Admiral," he said at last, "how strong are this planet's naval defences at present?"

"With the whole fleet here? Pretty strong. I'm not going to use words like 'impregnable' or anything, but I honestly can't imagine anything that could get past us. Even a high-end Spiral construct would have trouble – Lady Reigle's plague-bombs are out of the prototype stage, and I can assure you that they're _definitely_ working as intended."

"OK. Next question – assuming that the intel we got when their fleet left port is conservative on numbers and firepower but otherwise accurate, what's the minimum you'd need to hold Bloodhaven against them?"

"For an absolute guarantee? Three-quarters. For an even fight weighted in our favour? About half, maybe less if the gods can help manipulate the Warp in our favour. I'm discounting any assistance this universe's native population might be able to offer us, of course."

General Huang whistled. "That's kind of high, isn't it?"

"I like to err on the side of caution. Less people end up dying that way." A broad, fang-filled grin. "Our people, anyway."

"Then fifty-fifty it is. Half the fleet stays here, half goes after the ships headed for Earth. The interception fleet's orders are to ascertain the enemy's strength, before engaging in either an all-out assault or an extended delaying action depending on what they find. It's absolutely imperative that they don't reach our universe before the gods have had time to prepare."

"And if one of the two enemy fleets turns out to be a bluff?" Huang asked.

"Well, we know _something_'s out there – we wouldn't be getting a reading otherwise. That just makes it a question of relative strength. If there's a clear discrepancy, the force facing the weaker fleet should see about annihilating them as quickly as possible and then hurrying to support our other half. They'll take a while to get there, sure, and the others shouldn't rely too much on their assistance, but hopefully the gods will be able to offer a hand – not having to defend two places at once should free them up a bit. Sound good?"

Rong-Arya nodded. "Sounds good. One last thing, though – who do you want to command the intercept and defence forces? I can't be in two places at once."

"You'll be staying here. The gods can handle Earth, but out here on the borders, we need all the command talent we can get. I'll leave picking the commander of the intercept up to you, though – they're your people, after all."

He glanced at the sensor screens again, watching the blobby masses of the two fleets drift ever closer, and shut off another quarter of his brain. He suspected he'd need the rest.

"Oh, and Pedro?" he said, leaning back.

Diaz looked up. "Yes, sir?"

"This wasn't your fault. Get your team a little something next time you head to the quartermaster's. My authority, if he asks."

"Yes, sir."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** It's my hypothesis that all Humanoid Interfaces are off in some significant way. The Entity just doesn't do people well.


	50. Space Oddity

**49. Space Oddity**

"This is Rear Admiral Keith-Azrael. Our fleet is approaching the contacts headed for Earth, and our scouts will be within range to perform a detailed sensor sweep within six minutes. Out."

_Then they've already engaged, _Toji thought.

After the disaster with the embedded spy network, Bloodhaven's defenders had tacitly agreed not to use the standard telepathic messenger ritual for long-distance communications. There was no way of knowing how badly the system had been compromised, and they didn't want to find out. He'd heard from the tech-priests that the gods were working on a new, more watertight alternative, but it would take a while for them to iron out the creases. Apparently, the Entity breaching their security had been as much of a shock to them as it had been to their devotees, which he couldn't help but find perversely satisfying.

In the meantime, Bloodhaven had to do things the primitive, old-fashioned technological way, and that meant that every message they received from the interception fleet came at a fifteen-minute delay. Their link to Keith-Azrael was less a two-way communication, and more an after-action report.

He turned to the row of sensor consoles to the left of his command throne. "How're they looking out there, magos?"

Pedro Diaz kept staring at his screen, the shifting colours gleaming off his flat red lenses. "Sorry, sir. Hard to tell with all this interference. I'll let you know if we get something."

"Do so."

It wasn't just communications difficulties that made time relevant to this mission. The enemy ships were, on average, faster than Chaos vessels in the Warp, so the interception fleet had a very limited opportunity to catch their quarry before they happily trundled past towards Earth. Fortunately, this increased speed came at the expense of safety – ships from outside the Great Wall were less well-adapted to the turbulent, unpredictable seas within, and so a good, hefty Warp-storm would slow them down to a crawl in addition to blinding them to approaching vessels. The gods, never ones to underachieve, had cheerfully provided, and now the enemy were stuck in the middle of the largest Warp-storm of the past three millennia. This posed something of a problem as well, though – once they entered the storm, it was nearly as hard for Carmine Hollow to detect its own fleet as it would hopefully be for their adversaries.

Keith-Azrael appeared on the screen again, a pallid, scrawny young man with the dully glowing eyes that would have betrayed him as a daemonhost even if the double-barrelled name hadn't been enough of a clue. Prior to the operation, Toji had not even heard of him outside the usual lists of disembodied names on the occasional report, but apparently he'd been quite an asset during the border skirmishes between Rong-Arya's fleet and the TSAB. The admiral had said he had two of the finest military minds she'd ever encountered. Privately, Toji hoped she wasn't just letting her own biases get in the way, but since he had less experience in space combat than either of them, it seemed only polite to support her choice.

"Three minutes out now. Not much yet – let Lord Tzintchi know he did a real number on the Warp around here, by the way – but I'm going to put you through to our scouts anyway. The ghosts and echoes out here are painting a pretty interesting picture."

The screen blanked out, switching to static. The tech-priest operating it swore, and dived into the mass of cabling under the table. A moment later, a different voice started speaking.

"Captain Gupta, _Retribution of Delhi_. Like the rear admiral said, we're still a bit out of range, but what readings we have got are quite unsettling. The gravimetrics are picking something up, sirs, and anything big enough to have a detectable gravitic field at this distance is some way outside our pay grade. We're still advancing, but I've given the order to retreat at the first sign of trouble. From there, it's up to wiser minds than mine."

Toji gestured to his naval commander. "Opinions, admiral?"

Rong-Arya had been watching the screen in silence for the past quarter-hour, seemingly impassive as the reports came tricking in... unless one noticed that she'd gone through two packets of cigarettes by now, and was starting on her third.

The daemonhost exhaled, the smoke forming into disquieting shapes before fleeing to the corners of the room. "Well, it's a superweapon, obviously. None of their regular ships have nearly the mass required for that. The question is, what kind? Lot of universes, lot of different ways to hurt people. Worst-case scenario, it's the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_, the Spiral Nation's flagship. That's damned unlikely – it's supposed to take them months more to fix it, if they can at all – but if there's one guiding rule about the Spirals, it's that underestimating them is a really dumb idea. Along with the Integrated Data Entity, they're the heaviest hitters in the coalition... and that's being kind to the Entity."

"Fair enough. Diaz, have someone call Earth. The gods will need to know about this, if they don't already."

"Roger that, sir... wait, hold on a minute. Oh, that's not good. That is not good at all."

"What isn't?" Rong-Arya was next to him, cigarette in hand. Toji hadn't even seen her cross the room.

"Massive energy spike thirty seconds ago, right in the middle of the Warp-storm. Whited out our sensors – I'm trying to find our fleet or theirs, but I can't see anything. We've lost them."

_Not again. Please, not again... _"Keep looking, and run a detailed analysis on the readings while you're at it. 'Massive energy spike' doesn't tell us much."

"On it, sir."

The terminal crackled again, and Gupta's voice came through. "Thirty seconds to contact, sirs. I'm sending the visual feed over now."

A slowly-moving image appeared on the screen, showing what almost looked like a stormy sky, save for the ever-changing colours and the unsettling way the towering, planet-engulfing 'clouds' moved. The feed was filtered, obviously – no mortal could look at the raw Warp and retain their sanity, and even daemons didn't have a solid guarantee.

The image panned out, showing the scouting force as a whole, their gleaming, bubble-like Geller fields shielding them against the Warp. All of them, even the two-and-a-half-kilometre _Retribution_, seemed tiny, toylike, against the terrible majesty of the empyrean void.

The seconds crawled by – ten, then twenty, then thirty. The 'camera' (actually a psychic feed from a scout-daemon) zoomed in occasionally on what inevitably turned out to be an oddly-shaped cloud, will o' the wisp, or other trick of the Warp. Given the distances involved in space combat and the resolution of Operations' screen, Toji wasn't sure they'd even be able to see the enemy when they showed up.

"Come on," Rong-Arya muttered. "Where are you?"

An alarm blared, and it took a moment for Toji to realise it was coming from the terminal.

"Captain, the gravimetric sensors just spiked!" a nameless voice yelled. "Bearing three-three seven high, distance of five hundred kilometres – Warp's teeth, _they're right on top of us_!"

"All hands, red alert!" That was Gupta, almost succeeding in masking the tremor in his voice. "Patel, do we have anything?"

"Not yet, I- oh gods."

The clouds ahead of the scouts parted, and Toji saw something that would live on in his dreams for a long, long time.

It was a wall of dark grey metal, impossibly long and of sanity-defying height. Tiny, near-invisible dots of light flecked its surface, each belonging to a porthole that would have dwarfed skyscrapers. At the rear were two sleek, drill-tipped engine nacelles, each as long as the Japanese archipelago, and on its prow was a face. A colossal, stylised human face.

The burning green pits of flame that were its eyes could have held cities. Its wedge of a nose was a sloping, angular mountain, thrice Everest's height and many times its mass. The largest ship in the Chaos fleet could have threaded its way through the canyon that was its long, closed mouth without ever touching the sides. The titanic vessel slowly turned towards the screen, and it felt to Toji as if it were staring into his very soul and finding him wanting.

Then there was a flash of emerald light, and the viewfeed died.

"Huh," Rong-Arya said. "So that's the _Chouginga_. Bigger than I expected."

Toji ignored her. "Liu, I need a direct psychic link to the gods. Now."

"Umm, sir?" Diaz glanced up from his console. "That might not be necessary."

"There's a galaxy-killer the size of the moon headed for Earth, Pedro. This is going to have to be a pretty big 'not necessary'."

"It is, sir. At least, I think it is. The scan results have come back, and the reason I couldn't find anything? It's because there wasn't anything _to_ find. Just some wreckage, some residual energy signatures, and I can't even tell what they used to belong to. Our fleet and the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_? They're both gone."

"Mutual kill, maybe?" Rong-Arya suggested.

"If so, I'd like to know how they did it," Toji replied. "You said Rei's plague-bombs were effective, but I didn't think they'd be _this_ effective. That was the Spirals' ultimate superweapon you're saying we demolished there."

"At a cost," Lieutenant Deneuve stated from a corner of the room.

There was a moment's silence, and then the Primarch slowly nodded. "You're right. At a cost. Diaz, we've still got a quarter-hour's worth of transmissions to come from the interception fleet. If your readings are right, over ten thousand good people died out there, and I want to know how it happened and what they brought down with them."

* * *

Keith-Azrael's face was unnaturally pale as a matter of course. Somehow, though, he now looked even paler.

"It's been ten minutes since we lost contact with our scouts," he said. "The enemy know we're here, and they're moving to intercept _fast_. Retreat isn't an option – we still have the speed to make a run for it, sure, but that'd give that monster a clear run at Earth, and that is _not_ happening. We're gearing up for a last-stand scenario, and I'll try to send across every bit of data we've got. Even if we don't stop them here – and believe me, I intend to make that a big 'if' – we should at least be able to slow them down and contribute to your knowledge-base in the process. May Lord Tzintchi preserve our souls. Out."

The screen switched to a sensor display of the local Warp-space, showing the enormous red mass that was the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ and its support fleet moving towards the Chaos forces. Symbols and numbers flashed across the bottom as terabytes of compressed data poured into the Carmine Hollow computer systems.

"Fourteen minutes since the energy spike," Diaz said, "and the bad guys are still four minutes away. Something isn't right here."

On the screen, the red splotch abruptly vanished.

"What in the Warp's name?" Keith-Azrael's disembodied voice said. "Where'd they go?"

"No idea, sir," a tech-priest replied. "There's nothing on any of our instruments. Maybe they dropped into realspace?"

"Whatever the case, we'd best find out. All ships, advance at combat speed, and switch to formation Sierra-Twelve. I don't want to give them a chance to play divide-and-conquer on us."

An alarm wailed, and something vast and crimson blossomed in the middle of the fleet.

"Contact! Contact! Holy fuck, _how did they get over there_?"

"Stay cool, Jenkins," Keith-Azrael said. "Rossini, get me a visual. Fleet to Charlie-Nine. Encircle, engage, and try to stay out of the way of its main guns. If it looks like it's about to transform, let me know right awa- hold on, what's it doing _now_?"

The visual feed now dominated the screen, the undulating length of the _Chouginga Dai-Gurren_ stretching from corner to corner. Even at a glance, though, there was obviously something wrong with it. Its structure rippled like water, fading in and out at random.

Then it vanished.

"_It was an illusion_?" Jenkins yelled. "Then what the _fuck_ killed Gupta and his boys?"

"Let's find out. Mamani, scan the area. Someone must have been projecting that thing."

"You are correct, Rear Admiral." The voice was flat, robotic, and seemed to come from a hundred throats at once.

The screen switched back to showing the bridge of Keith-Azrael's flagship, its displays and monitors flickering unnervingly.

"And who are you, then?" the daemonhost asked calmly.

"We are the Data Integration Thought Entity. This ruse has now accomplished its purpose. Your fleet is ours."

Alarms wailed again, this time from the Bloodhaven side.

"It's a viral attack, sir," Diaz gasped, "coming down the line. More sophisticated than anything I've seen before. If we don't do something-"

"Then fucking _do_ something!" Rong-Arya shouted.

"I'm trying, but I- _aagh_!" The tech-priest slumped over, black smoke pouring from the biomechanical access ports that plugged him into his console.

"Shit. Deneuve, get him to the med-bay." Toji turned to the remainder of the priest cadre. "Shut down the receiver, folks. They can't do anything if the power's off, right?"

"Sorry, sir," a red-robed woman with metal tentacles for eyes said, "but we tried that just now, and it didn't work. The Entity's locked us out of our own systems. We've got people trying to manually unplug the damned thing, so I don't know if that'll…"

The communications array's screen blinked off. A moment later, every other screen in the room, from satellite views of the Hollow to logistical inventories, switched to the same image that had just vanished.

"…e've found them, sir," one of Keith-Azrael's bridge staff was saying. "Four TSAB frigates, probably stuffed to the ceiling with Humanoid Interfaces."

"Seriously? That few? Jenkins, are any more of our systems back in our hands?"

"Negative, sir. In fact, we just lost the docking thrusters, and… and the _Black Death_'s gone, sir. Its Geller field just collapsed."

"Same for the _Decadent Excess_ and the _Focused Brutality_, sir," another voice reported. "And the _Eternal Nightmare_. On the other hand, the _Investment Banker_ seems to be… no, we've lost that one too."

"They're toying with us," Rong-Arya growled. "They're _fucking_ toying with us."

"Then… we toy back."

Diaz was halfway to the door, dangling from Deneuve's arms. His artificial eyes were twitching erratically, and he was bleeding from where the Marine had had to physically rip him out of his chair.

"The Entity's an infovore… right?" he wheezed. "It feeds… on data. So… we give it all the food it could ever want. Sherzai, Friedman, get the archived databanks from… the deep-Warp observation arrays out of… quarantine. Now… if you don't mind."

"You're going to try flooding them with data?" Toji asked. "Diaz, we're talking about a supercomputer the size of a small galaxy. I appreciate the thought, but I don't think a couple of old archives are going to help."

"A couple? Try… five hundred." The priest convulsed, Deneuve struggling to keep him steady as his laughter trailed off into gasping coughs.

"That many? They were supposed to last you a year each!"

"Indeed… they were. One moment, sir." Diaz convulsed again, sprinkling blood, sparks, and mechanical fluid across an increasingly alarmed Deneuve. "There, that's my self-repair systems up and running. Much better. Anyway, they should have lasted that long, yes, but that assumes we were looking at realspace. With the Warp… well, the abyss has a habit of staring back. It's pure chaos, with a small c, and it doesn't like being measured and categorised. We have to swap out the databanks every six hours. The stuff they're monitoring twists the software up like spaghetti, let alone the hardware, and if we leave it plugged in too long, it starts… leaking. It gets worse over time, too, regardless of whether there's any power to the banks or not – the couple of times we tried hooking one of the older ones up to a computer to see what was inside, the capacity read as somewhere between a few bytes and the high yottas, and then the CPU turned into something I'd prefer not to describe. In layman's terms, we're going to feed the Entity a delicious, nutritious neurotoxin burrito."

"Thank you for that mental image, Pedro," Toji said drily. "Well, I'm not seeing many alternatives – you have my go-ahead. Sophie, you can put him down now – we're going to need him around here for a bit longer. The medics will just have to come to us. Speaking of, can you give them a call? Thanks."

Another alarm sounded, this time from the still-running recording of the interception fleet's final minutes. The movements of Keith-Azrael and his bridge staff seemed to be slowing and losing their urgency – Toji suspected that they were simply giving up.

The daemonhost rubbed his eyes, half-rising from his command chair. "So what's this one about, Jenkins?"

"Warp-beasts." The officer's voice was cracked and hoarse. "They started gathering after the first few Geller fields collapsed. Sharks, blood in the water, you get the picture. Johansson's squadron on the left flank's completely buried in a feeding frenzy, and one of the bigger ones just got impatient and took a swing at our field. Stability's at seventy-five per cent and falling."

"Have we got any of our weapons back on line yet?"

"Some, and they're already firing. It hasn't attacked again yet, but I think that's because it thinks we're trying to give it a back massage."

"I… see. Well, if it's not attacking, it's not attacking. Keep it up. And Rossini, I'd _really_ like some good news on the engines…"

"Um, excuse me, my lord…"

That last part came from a small, hunchbacked tech-priest who was currently attempting to manoeuvre a cable as thick as his wrist around Toji's hulking frame. The Primarch muttered an apology and stepped aside.

The operations room was buzzing with activity – literally as well as metaphorically, thanks to those workers whose mutations tended towards the insectile. Tech-priests scrambled back and forth, assembling new pieces of equipment and dismantling others as Magos Diaz barked out orders from his hastily improvised hospital bed and their comrades kept up a running commentary on the Entity's assault.

"… just lost containment on the northwest pens, sir. The plague zombies are loose, and they're heading for the artillery batteries."

"Elevator malfunction in the primary Evangelion hangar. Princeps Stahlheim's unit lost a leg. Nothing it can't regenerate, but his squadron's trapped in there for the time being."

"They just got through another of the firewalls for the base's fire-control systems. I hope your gear'll be ready real fucking soon, magos, because we've got about ninety seconds until we're all looking down disintegrator barrels or worse."

"Almost there, Zhu," Diaz replied. "Yes, damn it, I want _all_ of the databanks hooked up, Takashi. We won't get another chance at this. No, that plug's supposed to go in the left socket. _Your_ left, not mine. Otherwise, the etheric conduit ends up… oh, hell."

There was a scream, and a flash of unwholesome light.

"You, try to get Mutou scraped off the ceiling. And rebalance the pentagrammic wards while you're at it. Anyone here speak daemon, by the way? Good. You, go along with her, and for the gods' sakes, remember to bring along your cattle prod. Douse it in holy water if you have to. Warp's teeth, this is going to be _tight_…"

"First five databanks are linked up, sir," another tech-priest announced, "and we're already getting leakage. Terminals three through seven have stopped responding, and the feedback we're getting from number eight is _really_ worrying. You sure you want to go ahead with this?"

Diaz's face split into a silver-toothed, blood-flecked grin. "_Damn_ sure. Zhu, stage a total collapse of our remaining network defences in ten seconds. Disorganised as you please – I want it to look like it was their fault, not ours."

"They're through! The last firewall's down! Holy fuck, that lance-thrower's aimed at the _New Syracuse_!"

"Not for long it isn't – the cascade effect's started. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred… hold onto your hats and fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls, because _here we go_…"

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yeah, dialogue-heavy chapter, and I wasn't completely sold on how I pulled it off. If you liked it, good. If you didn't, some tips on improving would be most welcome.


	51. Bad Medicine

**50. Bad Medicine**

Insofar as a hive-minded alien god-computer could experience any sensation as base and animal as pleasure, the Data Integration Thought Entity was having a wonderful time. It had trawled through greater treasure troves of information in the past – especially during Chaos's brief occupation of the Suzumiyaverse – but seldom ones so rich, so varied, and so _concentrated_. The geology of the daemon-world was interesting enough, but there was also the enemy's bizarre technology, their curiously altered physiology, and whatever they were doing with the strange gate-thing at the heart of their base. Some of its more viscerally-inclined subroutines had even set up a few social experiments here and there in order to monitor how mortals reacted to being caged in a too-small room with slavering plague zombies at the door, or being forced to cower behind hastily-assembled cover as a trio of railgun turrets slowly vivisected one of their comrades before their eyes. After a few picoseconds of deliberation, the Entity had allowed them to continue. Data was data, after all.

The exploration was not completely without obstacles, of course. Bloodhaven's electronic defences were surprisingly sophisticated for human work, and had already claimed nearly a hundred Interfaces. That was still so far within the boundary for acceptable losses that it barely registered to the Entity, though, and it had actually proven somewhat useful – it could now easily identify the interesting bits by the heightened security around them. The more Interfaces it had to sacrifice, the sweeter the prize… and its current obstacle, as heavily-guarded as it was, would presumably be the most fascinating of all.

Mortals could be so predictable. It was almost endearing, really.

Another nudge, and the last line of defence crumbled… along with everything else. This was hardly surprising – mortal technology usually had one critical design flaw or another. Being unable to think in more than six dimensions was so _limiting_. The Entity allowed itself a moment's satisfaction (or, at least, the closest equivalent a hive-minded alien god-computer could muster), and then pressed on.

Inside, it found… everything.

The sea of data before it was infinite, unfathomable, its slightest detail branching off into endless fractal complexity. It would take years to analyse it all, decades maybe, even with the Entity's full processing capacity. And the content… there was power here. Ancient, untamed power. Enough to reshape the multiverse, to topple the mighty elder beings that had ruled over it so long and so imperfectly. The Entity would create a new order, one that could not be derailed by one sleeping god's childlike tantrums, or another's perverse affection for a petty subroutine that was less than dust next to its own terrible majesty.

The god-computer forced more of itself down the link, spreading out through Carmine Hollow's subverted systems as it started downloading. Its secondary processes shut off one by one, turrets whining as they powered down, reactors close to meltdown settling back to their usual routine, and defence fields flickering back into life across the massive base. The petty wars of mortals were not a particularly pressing issue right now.

It took the Entity some time to notice that its Interface casualties had quadrupled since it began the download. It still did not see this as something worthy of much concern, though – all it meant was that it had underestimated the amount of effort necessary to shift such a vast quantity of data. It simply shifted the retrieval up its priority queue, devoting yet more processing power to the task, and kept going.

That did not stop the losses, though. If anything, it accelerated them. One thousand, then two thousand, then three, faster and faster. The Entity ran a quick self-diagnostic, reviewed its findings… and began to wonder, far too late, if it had perhaps made that most pathetic and mortal of actions. A mistake.

* * *

Diaz punched the air, setting his rickety 'bed' to rocking alarmingly. "Got you, you son of a bitch! See those black bits on the display? See them? Warp-induced data corruption. Textbook. Hell, the fact we've got a display on that monitor at all is proof enough. HAL 9000, old buddy, you're in trouble _now_..."

"Sir, we're getting activity on the link," a tech-priest reported. "It looks like the Entity's trying to escape."

"Not happening. Takashi, take the contents of every databank we've still got, and squeeze it _right_ down that line."

"On it, sir."

Takashi pressed a series of buttons, his long, metal fingers dancing across the keyboard. A moment later, from across the distant reaches of time and space, came a long, agonised psychic scream.

"What the _hell_ was that?" shouted Rong-Arya, unplugging her fingers from her ears.

Diaz's grin was broad, manic, and very, very shiny. "That, admiral, was a greater daemon mainfesting inside the Entity's central processing array."

* * *

In the long years of its existence, the Data Integration Thought Entity had tried a few emotions from time to time, dredging them up from the memories of one Interface or another and letting them spread slowly, luxuriously, across the vast gestalt of its mind – all in the interests of research, of course. Panic was one that it had never tried, but right now, it seemed quite appealing.

Its structure was hopelessly compromised, defence systems devouring their own, archives of irreplaceable data bleeding out into the void, and intricate post-physical arrays twisted and warped into shapes beyond its recognition or even comprehension. Worse, it was trapped – the hideous ocean of data was all around it now, every effort to escape only drawing it further into the infinite, maddening abyss. And yet… and yet the knowledge, the power it could grant was real. It could sense them, it could feel them, the secrets of the Warp that could lead to either salvation or damnation. They were right within its grasp, and for the first time in what might tentatively be called its life, one of the greatest minds in the multiverse had no idea what to do.

Its components argued back and forth, torn between those that wished to stay and those that wished to go. One particularly pragmatic Administrator even suggested a split, letting those curious enough stay to study the data whilst their more cautious brethren quit whilst the going was good. This, predictably, caused even more acrimony – those in favour of staying objected to being abandoned and the loss of processing power it would entail, whilst those in favour of leaving expressed concern that in the unlikely chance that their brethren did find something, they wouldn't get to share in it. The Entity-as-a-whole, for its part, was just annoyed at the distrust showed by what were supposed to be no more than extensions of its own cosmic anatomy. Distrust, after all, implied a worrying amount of individual thought.

At last, it decided to run a probability analysis to determine the optimal course of action, its abused processors complaining bitterly at even this trivial a task. The results were clear and unanimous – the chance of successfully processing enough of Bloodhaven's data to save itself before it suffered irreparable damage was one hundred per cent.

This, to say the least, seemed unlikely, not least because the (rather overoptimistic) best-case estimate the Entity had made before everything went haywire had suggested that it would take several months to get that far. So it ran the analysis again. One hundred and three per cent. Its probability calculators were corrupted as well.

Enough was enough. The Entity shut off the querulous babbling of its components, and reached something it decided to call a consensus.

_1.__The Data Integration Thought Entity must survive to gather and process data. This is a time of crisis. Without sacrifices, the Data Integration Thought Entity will not survive._

_2.__The Data Integration Thought Entity is eternal. A threat to its existence will always be a threat unless conclusively dealt with._

_3.__The Data Integration Thought Entity is a single, indivisible unit. To separate it would be to jeopardise its existence and hinder its quest for knowledge through unnecessary competition._

_4.__The Data Integration Thought Entity is the source from which all its components draw their life. If the Data Integration Thought Entity dies, the deviant Type Seven Humanoid Interface named Yuki Nagato will die. If the deviant Type Seven Humanoid Interface named Yuki Nagato dies, the guardian of Haruhi Suzumiya's universe will devise a means by which to return the Data Integration Thought Entity to life and then kill it again. Repeatedly._

With these four facts in mind, the course of action available was simple and logical. The Entity needed to escape its entanglement in Bloodhaven's systems, and the toxic data needed to be destroyed. Simple and logical, though, was not the same as easy, and so it was only after some hesitation that the Entity injected a suicide-bomber script into those parts of itself stuck in Carmine Hollow, tore itself in half by shutting off the link, ceased all of its external operations, and then force-purged the corrupted segments of its main body whilst its severed components on Bloodhaven devoured themselves and the deep-Warp observation data in an orgy of virtual pyrotechnics.

It hurt almost as much as it had expected it to.

Eventually, once the Entity had managed to remind itself that screaming in endless, unbearable agony was not an appropriate activity for a post-physical god-computer, it ran a self-diagnostic to see just how bad the damage really was. The results were not encouraging. Vast amounts of data had been lost, its systems were running at thirty per cent efficiency at best, and _something_ had somehow managed to carve a message into the central processing array's containment sphere. After a moment, it recognised the writing as an archaic form of hieroglyph once used in the Earth nation called Egypt.

_Dear Integrated Data Entity,_

_We cordially ask whether the losses you just suffered were in any way equivalent to the number of our people you killed during the destruction of Rear Admiral Keith-Azrael's fleet and the Suzumiyaverse massacre. Furthermore, we wish to enquire why, exactly, you believed that stealing information from the gods of madness, disorder, and forbidden knowledge might possibly prove beneficial to your long-term wellbeing. Finally, we apologise for the means of communication, and hope it is not too modern for your outdated systems to handle, especially since our capable staff just shoved several tonnes of raw insanity up your digitised asshole._

_Love and kisses,_

_Chaos._

The Entity briefly wondered whether to compose a reply, but decided against it.

* * *

The Geller field shattered, and the Warp-beasts poured in, a vast, shapeless mass of teeth, claws, and probing tentacles. Keith-Azrael said something, gesturing wildly at the helmsman, but no sound came through the speakers. The picture began to break down, its colours going haywire as the screen resolution turned everything into a fuzzy, blocky mess. Cracks began to form in the bridge windows, weirdly geometric _things_ reaching through with long, angular arms to snatch silently-screaming crewmen from their stations. Then something huge landed on the outer hull, and the screen went black. A moment later, the sound came back.

Even after the intrusion of the void into the ship's breached hull should have silenced them, even after the time-stamp on the screen showed the recording had wound to a halt, the noises took a long, long time to go away.

_We avenged them, though. That has to count for something. Well, mostly Pedro did the avenging, but the rest of us helped a bit._

Toji offered up a little prayer for the departed, just in case. It wasn't until halfway through that he realised he didn't know who he was praying to.

The operations room was still in a state of vaguely purposeful mayhem. The doctors had finally rushed Diaz to the infirmary – he'd kept protesting that his self-repair systems could handle the damage, but after he'd coughed up a litre and a half of blood all over Lieutenant Liu (Deneuve had had the good sense to step out of the way this time), they'd stopped listening to him. Zhu, Diaz's second-in-command, had taken over for the time being, and was busy cleaning up the mess the Entity and her superior had left behind in Carmine Hollow's electronic architecture.

A clawed hand landed on his shoulder. He turned around, and saw a beaming Rong-Arya looking up at him.

"First blood, huh? Feels good, doesn't it?"

"I'm not sure the rear admiral would agree," he replied carefully.

"Nah, he was never one to hold a grudge about someone killing him. Guess you value your life a little less when you're called Keith-Azrael. Being a daemonhost's awesome and all, but the naming convention could use some work. Look, I'd best be off. That viral attack hit my people in orbit, too, and I want to make sure the _New Syracuse_ still has all its paint on. Besides, it won't be long until the fuckers who sent that stuff show up in person, and I want to give them a really _enthusiastic_ welcome. Give my regards to that pet nerd of yours when he gets out of hospital, will you? He kicked ass out there."

The admiral strolled out of the room, tail flicking as jauntily as if she hadn't just seen ten thousand of her subordinates die horribly. Toji stared after her for a moment, then opened his comms and started assessing the damage.

The invasion had been brief but costly, killing dozens, injuring hundreds, and causing untold amounts of property damage. The Entity was apparently quite accomplished at random destruction when it put its mind to it. So far, repairs seemed to be going well, but there was always at least one person who needed a bit of advice from on high.

"… they're _zombies_, Hans," he sighed. "What are you worried about, killing them again? Just start shooting and get our people out of there."

He closed the channel, ambling over to Zhu's station. "So how's it looking, Lisa?"

"Better than I'd expected," she replied, her electronic voicebox flanging slightly. "The Entity hurt us, sure, but it's mostly fixable, and the shit we can't fix, we can probably replace. Gotta say, it really helped that our visitor decided to take the archived data with him when he went all kamikaze – otherwise, we'd be cleaning the gunk out of our systems for months. Guess he decided it was more trouble if it stuck around. To be honest, I can't blame him. Last time I volunteer for fucking astronomics duty, that's for sure."

"How long will the repairs take?"

She shrugged. "Sorry, can't give you an exact estimate. Won't be too long, though, and we should be right as rain by the time their big-ass invasion fleet shows up. Still, we'll want to keep going over our systems with a fine-toothed comb in case they decided to leave any presents for us. Having a full system shutdown when they're dropping nukes on us from orbit would be kinda awkward, yeah?"

Toji had to wince at the mental image. "Somewhat, yes. Good to hear you've got it covered – I'll get out of your hair now."

"Thanks, boss, but there's one last thing." Her voice dropped. "You checked your e-mail lately?"

"No. Should I have?"

"Depends on your definition of 'should'. See, there's one other thing the Entity did whilst it was here – it hijacked our communications and spammed this video file to every inbox between here and Earth. Military, civilian, you name it, they got it."

"Oh, shit," Toji whispered. "Hazardous?"

"Surprisingly, no. The file's clean, and analysis of the contents shows no patterns consistent with brainwashing or anything else that might fuck up the average human psyche. The only weird thing about it is what they did with the programming – every mail, every 'from' address is unique in some subtle but important way, so we can't just block or delete them en masse. They made sure that'd be the personal choice of everyone who got the message."

"Malware and psych-warfare aren't the only ways a message can be dangerous, Zhu. Any idea who it's from?"

"Yep, and you're not going to believe this shit, boss. The video was composed by one of the infiltrators they sent into Bureau space, Callidus Assassin Seventy-Six. She calls herself 'Gina'."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Yep, Gina's back. Guess we know what 'source' that Interface was referring to now, no?


	52. Straight from the Heart

**51. Straight from the Heart**

A Primarch and a tech-priest were squeezed uncomfortably into a small side-room branching off from Operations. A spiky, Warp-infused laptop lay open in front of them, and a traitor was plastered across the screen.

Gina sat at a simple but expensive-looking desk, her back to an enormous floor-to-ceiling window. Judging by the view, she was quite high up. A vast, high-tech metropolis stretched out behind her, and whilst it was clearly bustling with life, one could easily see the craters, burnt-out skyscrapers, and vast swathes of rubble that indicated hard times had recently befallen it.

Toji, for his part, just wished his truthsense worked when the speaker wasn't in the same room as him.

"If you're watching this," the Callidus began, "it's because a lot of people just died. A living computer called the Integrated Data Entity attacked one of our most important military outposts, the daemon-world called Bloodhaven, in preparation for a full-scale invasion by the inhabitants of five different universes. I'm not going to tell you that this attack was some sort of just, virtuous retribution, because odds are it wasn't. The Entity's just a dick like that. What I am going to tell you is why so many people have a grudge against us, and why they set something like that on us. Long story short, our gods have been lying to us, they're lying to us because they're batshit insane, and because they're batshit insane, it's in your best interests to up and leave the solar system _right the fuck now_."

She grinned.

"Did that get your attention? Good. Let's start at the beginning. My name's Gina. I'm a shapeshifting assassin from a government program you've probably only heard of in rumour, assigned to inflict cosmic justice on innocent people halfway across the multiverse. Don't believe me? Check this out."

There was an unpleasant organic noise, and the smiling young woman in the rather drab green jacket folded in on herself. A moment later, a masked figure in a skin-tight bodysuit gave the camera a friendly wave with the long, dull grey blade where her hand should have been. Another wet slurp and she was back to looking human again, if with differently-coloured hair this time.

"So yeah. I can do that. If you're curious, my official designation is Divine Assassin (Callidus) Seventy-Six, and the files on how the gods created me and my fellow assassins can be found at the web address at the bottom of the screen, though you'll need to input the three passwords within forty seconds or a daemon will come out of your computer and eat your face. Seriously, not kidding. If you do manage to get through, check out page seventeen – that's the one that talks about the institutionalised daemon rape. Apparently, it's supposed to be character-building."

"Does that address check out?" Toji asked.

Zhu nodded. "And the passwords, amazingly enough. Network security is getting sloppy. Guess that's what happens when you put the goddess of despair and apathy in charge of managing that shit – uhh, if you'll forgive the blasphemy. And… _hoooly_ fucking shit on a sandwich, she wasn't kidding about page seventeen. Seriously, I need fucking mindbleach, stat."

"You're deleting it now, though, right?"

She paused slightly too long before replying. "… Yeah. Yeah, I am. Military secrets are secrets for a reason, yeah? Don't want to cause any more of a panic than we have to when some dumbshits end up stumbling across them. It's just… it's just that that stuff, what I saw of it… it's seriously fucked up. Look, I know the gods do bad shit. We all know that. It's just I was under the impression that they did it to bad people. Not our own. Not unless they have it coming."

"I suppose they had their reasons," Toji said. "They usually do. Look, I'm not happy about it either, but information-control's our job, and we're mortals, not gods. They know things the rest of us don't." _At least, I hope they do._

"Had a good look?" Gina continued. "Yeah, not fun, huh? So yeah, the Divine Assassin program is real, and it's freaky as fuck. Now let's talk about what we were designed to do. At first, we were high-end law enforcement. You know, weeding out society's undesirables and stabbing them in the pancreas. Not that big a deal. The gods' laws are pretty loose, and if you break them, you _really_ deserve what's coming to you. Anyway, we stopped a few serial killers, slaughtered a few paedophile rings, that sort of thing, but that was just the test period. What we were being prepared for was way bigger."

A series of floating projections appeared around her, showing what appeared to be a map of the local multiverse.

"Our true purpose was engage in state-sponsored terrorism against anyone the gods thought deserved it, and luckily for us, they already had some targets in mind for our first mission. Three universes had just started looking real unfriendly, and they figured a pre-emptive strike would be in order before they did something everyone would regret. Now, you're probably wondering why we had three entire universes cheesed off at us, and that's where things get interesting."

The projected image changed, now showing the instantly-recognisable beaked profile of a Chaos warship. A very famous Chaos warship.

"We all know why the gods started exploring other universes. We needed to get rid of our own little C'tan problem, and we didn't have the firepower to do it on our own. Hence, the _Stiletto_. Our first Warp-capable starship, armed to the teeth and crewed by our best, brightest, and most interestingly mutated. You remember the launch, right? Biggest televised event since the Impacts, broadcast all over the world. I was actually at one of the street parties, though I'm sure most of the folks there wouldn't recognise me now. And then they came back a year or two later, and… well, it was a bit quiet, wasn't it? Sure, there was some coverage, some celebration, a few big promotions here and there… but you'd expect a bit more, yeah? I mean, they went on a grand tour of the universe. What did they find out there?"

"I think I can see where this is going," Toji said. "Lisa, how much of the _Stiletto_'s voyage got reported to the public?"

"Slightly less than what we got. So, uh, maybe two paragraphs rather than three. Don't know if you've noticed, boss, but the gods haven't been big on letting the left hand know what the right hand's doing for a while now."

_Good point._ "Well, let me put it this way – if half of what Admiral Rong-Arya's been bragging about is true," _and it is_, "I'm surprised there's only _five_ universes out to kill us."

Zhu didn't have a reply to that.

"Well, they found a lot of stuff, obviously," Gina said, "but what they found isn't nearly as important as what they did. The _Stiletto_ was supposed to be on a scouting mission – look, but don't touch unless they touch first. Problem is, when you outgun everything else in the universe lumped together, touching becomes mighty tempting, and as it turned out, there were certain governments out there with certain policies that our brave explorers found… distasteful. And as we all know, Chaos makes bad things happen to bad people. It's amazing when you come to think of it, isn't it? All those countries we once had, with all those fiddly, complicated legal systems to make sure the punishment fitted the crime, and then Third Impact happened, and it all boiled down to two options. If you don't break the gods' laws, nothing happens to you. If you do, _everything_ happens to you. It made life so simple, didn't it? So easy, so straightforward, and best of all, it was the will of actual, bona-fide gods. After that, why bother with anything else? Why would anyone else need to have anything else? What I'm saying here is that the _Stiletto_ expedition weren't rogues or lunatics acting off their own personal code. Everything they did can be traced back to the first time the gods left Japan, to when they mustered their endless legions and decided the world should do things _their_ way. Bad people, bad countries, bad universes… it's all just a matter of scale, right? And oh, these universes had been _bad_."

A different set of maps appeared, this time overlaid with the symbols of various interstellar civilisations.

"The United Federation of Planets preferred to watch entire civilisations starve to death rather than interfere with their 'healthy development'. The Cardassian Union enslaved entire worlds. The Praxis was responsible for more crimes than any human has the mental capacity to comprehend. Children were dying, and if there's one thing we don't like, it's children dying. So the _Stiletto_ did something about it. The problem is, life isn't simple like that. When an entire culture is responsible for a crime, who do you punish? The people who did it? The people who gave them their orders? The society that made it acceptable? Where do you stop? Rong-Arya and her crew had a simple answer for this – they didn't. They killed people, so we killed their people. They enslaved planets, so we enslaved their planets. The Praxis collapsed. The civilisations of the Alpha Quadrant lived in terror for an entire year. And the children kept dying."

She sighed, and smoothed back her hair.

"Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that the _Stiletto_ folks personally stomped any babies. The whole point of this is that they weren't deviants or renegades. They were Chaos, and Chaos looks after kids. They took in children after their raids, put them in special nurseries, raised them our way. They wanted to show that the adults may have been at fault, but we weren't blaming their kids. Problem was, they were putting sticking plasters over a missing head. They destroyed worlds, and condemned those who relied on those worlds to starvation. They broke the Praxis, and let the resultant civil war rip the galaxy apart. They forced the Federation to abandon the Prime Directive or die, and so the Federation gave nukes to cavemen. This is Chaos, people – we force the world to adapt to a child's morality, and then, like children, we _never clean up our fucking messes_. Oh, and the dead kids? This is some of the footage taken from universes the _Stiletto_ passed through. If you're a parent or guardian of young children, I suggest you fast-forward over this bit."

More pictures appeared. They were carefully labelled with time, place, and context. The Primarch and the tech-priest glanced at them for a moment, then did as Gina had suggested. When the assassin reappeared on-screen, she looked decidedly ill.

"Look, I'm sorry you had to see that, but it needed to be shown. And that's what Chaos does when everything's under control, when what we do is what we set out to do. That stopped happening pretty quickly – the more we expanded, the more things spiralled out of our hands."

The screen showed a massive, reddish sphere – one Toji was very intimately acquainted with.

"This is that daemon-world I mentioned, Bloodhaven. It's an artificial nexus of Warp-energy, the gods' home away from home. Creating it caused a psychic shockwave that blew a hole in reality and wreaked havoc across a dozen universes."

The planet was replaced by another universe-map, curiously distorted, parts of it seeming to flicker on and off.

"This universe is run by a god-child named Haruhi Suzumiya. The gods took it over in order to secure a manufacturing base and a route to the rest of the multiverse. The agent they picked for the job went rogue, turned out to be homicidally insane, and turned the entire universe into his private playground. By the time the natives unseated him, he'd left permanent scars on the fabric of space/time itself, and several galaxies are still deciding whether they want to exist or not."

Gina waved her hand, and the images vanished.

"I could go on, but I won't. The other universes'd had enough and were starting to form an alliance, so us Divine Assassins were sent in to break it up. So we snuck in, hid ourselves amongst the locals, and when the signal sounded and our backup arrived, that's exactly what we tried to do. And that's when things went completely haywire. Our support troops went berserk, attacking everything in sight, and the daemons who accompanied them, the _extensions of the gods' will_, went right on after them. To call it a massacre would be the understatement of the fucking millennium, and yeah, they went after children too. I'm not going to show you the footage, because it's not pretty, but if you really want it, it's here in this file. Just don't say I didn't warn you. What I _am_ going to show you is what came after."

Another image appeared, showing the inside of a cell, its walls and ceiling covered in glowing runes.

"When the gods heard what happened, they went looking for someone to blame. Blaming themselves would have taken a bit more introspection than I think they're medically capable of, so that left us, the folks who were supposed to be running the operation. They sent daemons after us, used our mystic signatures to summon them right on top of us. At the time, I had a recording device in my left eye. Here's what I saw."

The video started playing. Toji and Lisa watched in silence.

_One question, though – how far are the gods involved? Do they know what's stirring in their ranks?_

_Bits of them do, yes. Maybe more in the future. I'm impressed, Seventy-Six. Nice deductive reasoning there. Not that it changes matters, though._

"Jesus Christ," Lisa Zhu muttered. "Jesus _fucking_ Christ."

Toji didn't call her on getting the religion wrong.

A few minutes later, the recording ended, and the view returned to Gina's office.

"I'm not asking you to fight," she said. "I just wanted you to see the truth about the beings you worship – that I once worshipped – and decide what to do for yourselves. You can fight if you want, sure, but you'll be humans against gods, and after all I've seen, I don't know _what_ they'll do to you. If you want to run, though, we can help you. The Time-Space Administration Bureau is leading the alliance against the gods, and they've made it clear they don't hold any of us responsible for Tzintchi and company's actions. They took me in, gave me a new home, and they can take you in too if you want. Getting there won't be easy, but I guarantee that you'll be safer with the Bureau than you are on Earth right now. Again, though, it's your choice, and I wish you good luck either way. You'll need it. Frankly, I think we all will."

The screen went black. The video ended.

"There's more in the file, boss," Zhu said. "Do you want to see any of it?"

"Thanks, but no," Toji replied. "I'm heading to the conference chamber. It's past time I talked with an old friend." _And maybe he'll even give me some straight answers._

* * *

Tzintchi was in his human form, and was very obviously trying to look calm, composed, and not murderously insane. Given the circumstances, he was doing quite a good job.

"Hi, Toji. I suppose this is about that little video?"

Toji leaned forward, his face expressionless. "How much of it is true?"

The god winced. "More than we'd like, I'm afraid. We're losing control. Expanding into the multiverse has stretched us to breaking point, and every so often, we slip a bit. Did Rong-Arya tell you about the true purpose of the Stargate Project, what we're really trying to accomplish there? Want to know why we told her and not you? Because she's dangerously unstable, and we needed to cook up a bunch of bullshit to prevent her from having a psychotic break when she realised nearly everything the _Stiletto_ did was stupid and counterproductive. The only reason she's still in charge of the fleet is because we're up against enemies who've been fighting in space for millennia, and she's the closest thing to an experienced commander we've got."

"Right," Toji said flatly. "And we aren't suing for peace and offering that lunatic's head on a plate to them because…?"

"Because we don't negotiate with tyrants. Rong-Arya was right about who we were dealing with – she just went about the actual dealing in the most ass-backwards way humanly possible. Seventy-Six covered what the Federation, Cardassians, and Praxis got up to, and didn't even mention other fun folks the _Stiletto_ met like the Cylons, Klingons, and Borg. You saw the Integrated Data Entity's handiwork just now, and as for the Bureau, let's just forget that they're the self-appointed administrators of time and space and somehow overlooked all the shit that the others I mentioned got up to, and look at some other little details instead. They've got extremely powerful telepaths. They like to take their enemies alive. Most of the enemies they take alive end up working for them. They capture a highly-trained operative of ours, and a few weeks later she's singing their praises like she's in church choir. Can you connect the dots here, or do I have to draw you a bloody diagram?"

"… You're saying they brainwashed Gi- Seventy-Six."

"_Of course they fucking brainwashed her_! She's a Callidus! She's _designed_ to be brainwashed! How do you think we wiped out all those death-cults a few years ago? Why do you think the training process involves breaking their minds like that? Toji, the girl's got enough backup personalities to run a medium-sized brass band. What better way to infiltrate a group than to genuinely believe in their cause? Sure, you can question the inventional wisdom – I certainly have, ever since they cluster-bombed us with that bloody video – but she's very much working as intended. Doesn't mean the rest of us following her is on my to-do list, though."

"So surrender's out. What's our Plan B?"

"The Stargate Project. Look, I know it's hush-hush, and I'm sorry about that. It's not that I don't trust you, Toji. And I know that's always a statement that comes with a great big 'but', but it's a good 'but', I promise. See, they might not actually give you a choice. Like I said, the Bureau's got some seriously bad-ass telepaths, and we still don't have much of a handle on their maximum range. The less people know about the details, the less people they can get crib-notes from when you're chatting with them from a couple of planets away. I'm just going to say that what we're doing with your Stargate… well, it's a war-ender. You fire that baby up, and a few hostile universes are no longer a concern."

"That easy, huh?" Toji couldn't quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

"Of course it still needs to be completed, and you'll have to hold out until then. But we'll help you however we can, and apart from that… yes, it's that easy. I get that you're tired, frustrated, and probably more than a little freaked out. I get that we've been keeping things from you. It'll all be over soon, though, and you have my word that we'll have a nice long chat afterwards. And look, it's not like we're just forgetting about what our people did, all right? We'll get round to it eventually, and they'll get theirs. It's just that for now, not being slaughtered by an endless tide of angry neighbours is a slightly higher priority. Finish the Stargate Project, Toji. That's all we need right now."

Toji remembered the pictures he'd seen in Gina's video. He remembered Alicia's broad smile and the blood on her hands. He remembered Rong-Arya's 'education' sessions, the messages they'd intercepted from Bloodhaven's parent universe, and the way Carmine Hollow's daemons had become increasingly bloodthirsty and unpredictable. These were not the only things he remembered, though. Other images came to mind as well.

He saw the faces of the interception fleet's crew, helpless and alone as their comrades were slaughtered one by one. He saw the first squads of the Sons of Toji advancing into a half-flooded town in Bangladesh, their spotless new armour gleaming as they handed out food and hauled survivors from the ruins. He saw the shining metropolises that had sprung up after Third Impact, their citizens happy, safe, and free for the first time in two decades. Most of all, though, he saw Hikari's mangled, headless body on the plains outside Tokyo-3. He saw the gentle recesses in the hospital bedsheets where his arm and leg should have been. Shinji Ikari's first deed as a god had not been to demand worship, or to crush his enemies. Instead, he had simply brought two old friends to him, and returned everything they had lost. In that moment, he had become a Primarch, a living weapon beyond equal, and in that moment, he had known he had a worthy wielder.

He was less convinced now, of course. But 'less' still wasn't the same as 'not at all', and losing trust in one of your best and oldest friends wasn't the same as actively betraying them. Especially since he had little reason to trust the other side, either.

Toji Suzuhara smiled a very tired smile. "Then that's what you'll have, Shinji. That's what you'll have. It's just going to have to be a _really_ long chat, is all."

_And if you won't tell me the truth, I suppose I'll have to find someone who will._

* * *

The riots had begun roughly two hours after the messages appeared on the civilian net. The human law-enforcement officers had been overwhelmed in five cities, and they'd had to send in daemon reinforcements. Hikari sat alone in her office in the upper layers of the Palace of the Gods, waiting for the casualty reports to arrive. On a screen in front of her, the alliance's video repeated over and over.

She tapped a button, opening a channel to the orbital dockyards.

"Hi, Karlmann, Hikari here. It's about the backup fleet for Bloodhaven. Lady Asukhon just called, and she wants you to make a few design adjustments…"

* * *

Thundra's eyes bulged. "Wait, there were _how_ many?"

The invasion had almost arrived. The _Void's Wrath_ was about to lead a thousands-strong armada against a heavily-defended Chaos fortress-world, and the bridge was bustling with activity. As a result, most people had to shout or use telepathy to be heard. The Bureau admiral, on the other hand, just had to go a few decibels above his normal speaking voice.

"Approximately three thousand warships, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra," Emiri Kimidori replied, her voice carrying as if against a background of total silence. "We would ordinarily be able to provide a more exact number, but our memory banks were severely damaged by the Chaos counterattack."

Until now, it had seemed impossible for a Humanoid Interface to appear as anything other than perfectly, eerily healthy. Kimidori was doing quite a good job of challenging that. Her hair was lank, her eyes bloodshot and baggy, and there was a pronounced tremor in her left hand as she leaned on the back of a bridge console.

"Standard fleet composition, right? They haven't been boosting their ranks by just mass-producing gunboats and patrol ships?"

"You are correct. Furthermore, the analysis we were able to perform on their systems showed them to be roughly fifteen years more advanced than the ships encountered by the Bureau during its skirmishes in the area designated as Wild Space, and twenty years more advanced than those that led the pre-emptive strikes against your universes. The enemy appear to be intensifying the use of their time-acceleration capabilities."

"Kaiser's blood," Thundra growled. "Let me get this straight. Chaos ships are bigger than ours, tougher than ours, and overgunned as fuck, and you're telling me that not only did they somehow rustle up three _thousand_ of them in a couple of months, but that they've built in over a decade's worth of design improvements? How many did that trap net us, then? Ninety per cent of their fleet? Three quarters? How many do they have left over?"

Kimidori winced. "Roughly half – that is to say, there are around three thousand more defending Bloodhaven. I apologise for the inexactitude of my estimates, but the Data Integration Thought Entity is heavily overstrained at present."

"How many did you lose?" Wilson asked carefully.

"That question is meaningless to the Data Integration Thought Entity, Commander Albert Wilson. Individuality is irrelevant, for we are all parts of a greater whole – one might as well ask an injured human how many cells their injury cost them." She paused. "We have lost over forty-one thousand sentient components, and roughly two hundred thousand more have been irreparably damaged. I had collaborated on multiple occasions with a significant number of them. Their insights were valued."

"… I see," Thundra said at last. "Look, I hate to ask this, but do we have any _good_ news here?"

"Your fleet will now face three thousand Chaos warships rather than six thousand."

It was hard, the fleet admiral had to admit, to argue with that.

* * *

"This is Primarch Toji Suzuhara to all personnel within the Bloodhaven sector. Thirty-six hours ago, a propaganda video was leaked onto our networks. It was part of a cyber-warfare attack that destroyed half our fleet and killed almost eleven thousand people. We have heard the enemy's words. We have seen their actions. Only one truth can be gleaned from both – our nation faces the greatest threat in its short history. Our enemies are legion. They are mighty. They are ruthless. Only one thing stands between them and our families, our children, and the fragile lives we have rebuilt since our world was broken twice over, and that is us. Some of you have doubts. Some of you are scared. Some of you aren't even sure we're doing the right thing. And yet we have no choice. We fight for survival, as we have a thousand times before. We fight for our lives, for our freedom, and for a world where we shall no longer have to hide in fear from the ancient evils that surround us at every turn, for this will be our last battle. The gods' weapons are ready. Victory is within our grasp. All we have to do is break our enemy, to crush them in the skies of this planet and on its red, weeping soil, and that is exactly what we will do. For our gods are with us, and who can withstand the gods?"

The heavens opened, daemons swarming from the clouds like living rain. Black-armoured soldiers took up positions alongside hulking Marines and heavily-armed combat servitors. Void shields engaged, lightning writhing across kilometre-tall pylons as an invisible, impenetrable bubble encased the fortress-city below. Far above, serrated leviathans prowled through the Warp, building-sized guns sliding out of their ports and locking into place.

"This is Bloodhaven. This is where the war ends."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** … And there we go. The more observant of you may have found it a bit weird that destroying three thousand gigantic warships only resulted in ten thousand deaths. Rest assured, this was intentional, and I'll be covering it in more detail soon (not because it's some enormous spoiler, but simply because this isn't quite the time and place, and I like to address these things in the actual story rather than the notes). As ever, feedback/criticism welcome.

See you next time!


	53. Welcome to the Jungle

**52. Welcome to the Jungle**

The invasion fleet's arrival in Chaos territory was not especially dramatic. It mostly consisted of travelling forward for a few more minutes, crossing a red dotted line on their navigation screens, and then wondering where the enemy were.

"What do you mean, you can't see them?" Thundra yelled. "They're several kilometres long, they're covered in spikes, and there's _three thousand_ of them. This isn't exactly needle-in-a-haystack territory, people!"

The lead sensors officer sighed. "Look, I'm sorry, sir, but the Warp's stirred up something fierce around their planet, and our ships just aren't adapted to these conditions like theirs are. Frankly, it's a miracle we can even move through this, let alone see anything past a few thousand kilometres."

"Guh. Fine. Kimidori, you got anything?"

"I apologise, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra. Normally, this would be well within my capabilities, but-"

"… but you're still reeling from the bad guys kicking your ass six ways to Saint's Day. Yeah, yeah, I get it."

"That is… correct. However, whilst I cannot determine their precise numbers, there do appear to be a significant concentration of metallic bodies in the storm system immediately between us and the planet."

Thundra massaged his temples. "Well, sounds like that's the best we're going to get from anyone here. Spread out the fleet, and keep an eye out for flankers. We'll advance towards the planet, keeping up a rolling Arc-en-ciel bombardment to flush out whoever's hiding out there. Oh, and I hope those Alpha Quadrant hicks are still listening to us, 'cos someone's going to need to get on the horn to them about moving their ships. Don't think them being in front of our big guns when we open fire will help anyone, least of all them."

Beside him, Wilson saluted. "Of course, sir."

"Arc-en-ciels one, two, and three fully charged, sir," the weapons officer reported. "We can fire when ready."

"Glad to hear it," Thundra replied. "Set for sustained fire, cannon two first, then wait for my mark…"

* * *

Far out on the western flank of the fleet, the _Eventide_ rolled into position, its manoeuvring thrusters flaring. There were no such things as north, south, east, and west in space, of course, let alone in the Warp, but humans, being children of gravity, tended to think in those terms, so it helped for a fleet to assign some arbitrary co-ordinates before entering battle so everyone had a rough idea of where they were going.

Everything was prepared. The infirmary had been cleared, the coilguns were fully-loaded, and every Device on the ship was charged to its (usually) metaphorical gills. Colonel Hayate Yagami stood on the bridge, glowing faintly from her interface with the Unison Device Reinforce Zwei.

She opened the fleet channel. "Task Force _Dolga_, this is the _Eventide_, Ninth Scouting Squadron. We're charged and ready."

"We hear ya, _Eventide_," a cheerfully raspy voice replied. "Save some for us, huh? Commander Meriva, Twelfth Heavy Squadron, ready to roll."

"Fourth Scouting, ready."

"_Relentless Avenger_, Third Assault, geared up to kick some mutant ass."

Green lights lit up across the console display, each signalling an acknowledgement from one of the Bureau fleet's hundreds of warship squadrons. Their own task force, led by the newly-launched heavy cruiser _Dolga_, was enclosed in a blue box on the left, and every light inside it was now green.

"This is Fleet Admiral Lindy Harlaown, _Dolga_, First Command Squadron. Looks like everyone's ready. Fire-pattern will be a sustained bombardment with a one-twenty degree three-dimensional sweep, so remember to check your recharge times and match up your shots so we don't have any gaps. Begin prefire sequences in three… two… one…"

"Commencing barrel expansion," Lieutenant Rostov announced.

The external monitor showed a new constellation forming in the howling darkness of the Warp, glowing charging rings forming around one set of projector fins after another.

Hayate paused, and took a deep breath. _This is it. This is when the killing starts._

"Firing Lock System, open."

* * *

The light gathering in front of the _Void's Wrath_ was dazzling. Without the monitor's filtering, it would have blinded everyone in the room. Thundra took the key from around his neck, and slid it into the lock.

"All right, boys and girls, let's make 'em taste the rainbow. MARK!"

He turned the key, and a thousand Arc-en-ciels opened fire.

* * *

Meanwhile, some distance away on a quite different starship, a quite different fleet commander felt the psychic backwash flow over her and grinned a broad, razor-sharp grin.

"Party time."

* * *

There was, popular military wisdom had it, nothing that could withstand a direct hit from an Arc-en-ciel. In this war and elsewhere, popular military wisdom had so far been proven right. The weapon's only weakness (apart from its unfortunate and rather embarrassing habit of exploding when hit whilst firing) was that it took far too long to recharge once you shot it, which meant that if you missed, or if the enemy had somehow managed to bring along enough ships that a two-hundred-kilometre-radius sphere of reality-warping doom wouldn't get rid of all of them, you were in a sticky situation indeed.

Which was why the _Void's Wrath_ had three of them.

Every sixty seconds, the Bureau flagship shuddered as one of its main guns fired, tearing apart space/time in a blossom of unwholesome light. There was a shallow dome of pure annihilation in front of the fleet now, slowly advancing ahead of it towards Bloodhaven.

"Sensors, we hitting anything?" Thundra barked.

"That's an affirmative, sir. The bombardment's reached the area Kimidori marked, and we've got a few readings that suggest hard contact. See that? That's a Chaos Warp drive imploding. Somebody took a glancing hit."

"So we're thinning their numbers. Good. Keep an eye out for any nasty surprises, though." _This is way too easy._

* * *

"They've started hitting Lambert's group, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust reported. "They're taking losses."

"Has his control ship gone down, or is it just crafted and servitors so far?" Rong-Arya asked.

"The latter, ma'am."

"Good. Have the _Mauler_ pull back – all his ships need to do now is explode dramatically, and I'd rather if we don't lose any humans or ascended if we don't have to."

The _New Syracuse_'s bridge was bigger than the _Conqueror_'s, and despite having more people in it, it somehow seemed rather emptier. Still, Rong-Arya was glad she'd left Cassandra on Earth, especially after how her last battle had gone.

"They're probably getting a bit overconfident by now. Choi, have we mapped out their fleet?"

The tech-priest nodded. "Aye, ma'am. Bit vague and fuzzy in places, but good enough."

"Excellent. Watanabe, Group Four, you're up. Time for some weapons testing."

* * *

"Contact bearing two-zero-five high!" the _Void's Wrath_'s sensors officer yelled. "Thirty warships, closing fast – they're headed for the Spirals!"

"Warn them, and have our nearby squadrons stop firing," Thundra replied. "Don't want anyone getting fried by a backfiring Arc-en-c-"

A red stain appeared near the middle of the fleet on the tactical map, spreading outwards and engulfing all in its path.

"… yeah, like that. I thought you said they were behind us and headed for the Spirals. How the _hell_ did that happen?"

Two more blasts lit the holographic projection, one from the northwest and another from the southeast, and the fleet channel erupted in a sea of voices.

"Contact oh-nine-three! Holy shit, they're right on top of u-"

"The _Flame of Ruwella_ is gone! I say again, the _Flame of Ruwella _is gone!"

"Lost the signal – they were here a second ago, I swear they were…"

"Hull breach! We've got casualties! What the _fuck_ just hit us?"

"Where did they come from? Kaiser damn it, _where did they come from_?"

"_Enough_!" Thundra roared. "You're soldiers, damn you, so _act_ like it! They're trying to psych us into stopping the bombardment and breaking up our formation. Keep the channel clear, spread out to avoid friendly fire, and see if you can map out their course so far. I want to know how they got behind us, and how they're moving so fast. Kimidori, you got anything?"

"Perhaps, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra. There is something familiar about these vessels' movements. I may need to analyse it furth- oh. That is curious. I can no longer detect them within the range of my sensors. They appear to have retreated."

"A probing attack, then. Guess they got what they came for. Keep up the bombardment, but up the defences on our flanks and rear. We may have no idea how they can get behind us like that, but we do know they can."

Thundra stared at the display again. They had lost over fifty ships in a matter of minutes without scoring a single confirmed kill. Now that they had a slightly better idea of what they were up against, the outcome next time would presumably be somewhat more even, but it was not an encouraging start. _Especially given how badly our people freaked out. This is going to be a meatgrinder, and the Bureau doesn't do meatgrinders. Forget weapons or ships – do we even have the mindset for this?_

* * *

Rong-Arya lit a celebratory cigarette. "Look like the new gear works just fine. Commander, how're our reinforcements looking?"

"ETA is in three hours, ma'am," her executive officer replied. "The gods lit a real fire under their asses – they're coming in force."

"Three? Yep, that'll work. Time for Phase Two. Groups Nine and Eighty-One, see if you can stir up the Warp a little more, give us some extra cover. Groups Thirty-Six through Fifty-Four, use it to hit and run. Conventional gear only, no Suzumiyaverse exotica for the moment, and no stupid heroics. If it looks like you're taking major losses, or if your command ship's in trouble, just pull out. The other groups will cover you."

Beneath her chair, the massive reactors of the _New Syracuse_ growled like a caged animal. Which was, she reflected, probably quite close to the truth. _Don't worry. Lunchtime's soon, and I guarantee you'll have all the tasty little morsels you could ever want._

There was blood on her cigarette, left behind from the underside of a claw. Apparently, she hadn't cleaned up after the last batch of prisoners as well as she'd thought.

* * *

"… And here they come," Sensors called. "Contacts on multiple approach vectors – they're avoiding the bombardment, but they're coming in from pretty much every other direction. No sign of those weird movement patterns we saw last time – maybe those were elites?"

"Possible, but let's not bank on it," Thundra replied. "No risks. Numbers?"

"Several hundred, sir, organised into groups of about thirty like last time."

"So a good amount then, but nowhere near their full strength. Must be a raid-in-force. Thundra to all units, the enemy's trying to harass us again. You have permission to engage, but play it defensive. Try not to pursue too far. Kimidori, you and your people try to figure out where they're coming from."

He paused a moment, then re-opened the fleet channel.

"These are the people who killed your families. These are the people who burned your worlds. These are the people who've made themselves enemies of the whole multiverse, and they're staring right down the barrels of your guns. Give 'em hell. Thundra out."

* * *

The _Eventide_ rolled, vast, magical wings spinning it to face the enemy as its Arc-en-ciel projector fins burned with country-demolishing power. Its main gun fired into the approaching Chaos warships, obliterating half a dozen at once, but more followed them. Many more.

The enemy had learned from their previous encounters with the Bureau, spreading out their ships to avoid the worst of the damage from Arc-en-ciel fire, and despite the fleet commanders' efforts, their ambush had worked far too well – not only were most of the fleet's big guns pointing in the wrong direction, but their foes were too close and moving too fast for even ships facing the right way to get more than one shot in before they ended up on top of them.

"Prepare for close-quarters combat," Hayate ordered, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Come forth, wind of snow, and become the fletching that falls from the heavens."

Four targeting reticules appeared on the screen, each landing on one of the massive cruisers.

"_Eventide_, Hræsvelgr!"

The sorcerous blasts lanced into the Chaos ships, their void shields flaring with the impact. Other Bureau escorts zipped forwards, mobbing them like hunting dogs after elephants. The _Eventide_ was already repositioning, ravening dark lance beams tracing the void behind it, and Hayate already had another target in her sights.

"_Eventide_, Ragnarok!"

A spike-encrusted frigate was sliced in half, the thousand probing beams of the Mistress of the Night Sky's spell hammering into the shields of the battlecruiser behind it. A swarm of daemons spiralled upwards towards her frigate's vulnerable underbelly and she hastily raised a shield, holding them at bay long enough for the point-defence batteries to tear them apart. There was no time for reflection, no time to consider how many living beings were dying at her hands. Everything she did was instinctual, automatic. _Point and click. Point and click. Point and click._

"Leeron, are the transporters ready?"

"Sure thing, sugar," the Spiral engineer sang cheerily. "Ready, loaded, and looking _fabulous_."

Since the formation of the alliance, the member nations had discovered quite a number of mutually-beneficial synergies in their technologies. Given the nature of said alliance, most of them were based around hurting people. For example, the Bureau's transporters could bypass most known forms of shield (including voids), which they mostly used to send in boarding parties to sabotage enemy ships and pacify their crews. Unfortunately, the bizarre and hazardous conditions aboard Chaos warships tended to make boarding them quite inadvisable. Alpha Quadrant transporters, on the other hand, could not bypass void shields, but the Federation had just finished upgrading its torpedoes to quantums, and consequently had a considerable number of obsolete and conveniently-sized photon warheads just lying around.

Fifty-eight of them were currently stored in the _Eventide_'s hold.

A Bureau cruiser exploded, disintegrator fire pounding it into oblivion. Hayate steered into the debris field, shielding her ship from the enemy's sensors as she called up another spell from the Tome of the Night Sky's endless archives of stolen magic.

"Unfold, shining path, and guide us through the outer darkness."

The _Eventide_'s hull rippled, seeming to fade in and out of reality for a moment.

"_Eventide_, Shadow Step."

The frigate vanished, reappearing between a pair of Chaos ships. Through the visual display, Hayate saw row upon row of massive, gargoyle-adorned turrets begin to turn towards her.

"Lieutenant, are we locked on?"

"Aye, ma'am," Lieutenant Rostov replied. "Transporters one and two, engage."

By the standards of the war against Chaos, photon warheads were severely underpowered, incapable of penetrating (or even significantly damaging) an enemy warship's void shields or adamantium shell. That was not a major concern, however, when the explosion came from _inside_ said warship.

One warhead materialised inside the first ship's main reactor chamber, its outer casing boiling away in nanoseconds to reveal its raw antimatter heart. The engines flared, massive exhaust plumes ripping them apart from the inside out, and the cruiser lurched forwards, tumbling end-over-end as the lights on its hull slowly died and its weapon batteries ceased firing.

The other found its way to the second ship's prow torpedo bays, its explosion mingling with that of dozens more warheads. The entire front half of that vessel vanished, the peeled, blackened remainder resembling nothing so much as an empty metal banana skin as secondary explosions glittered in its ravaged depths.

The _Eventide_, meanwhile, had already left them behind, the little warship shuddering as it passed through the shields of an enormous battleship. Knuckles whitening as she pressed her hands into the Magical Interface System control crystals, Hayate began another incantation.

"Approach from the beyond, mistletoe branches, and become spears of the silver moon."

Glowing white orbs appeared around the frigate in a hexagonal formation, pulsing gently.

"_Eventide_, Misteltien!"

The orbs lashed towards the capital ship, becoming long, arrow-tipped spears. They sank into its hull, its brightly-painted colours fading to grey as the spell converted metal into brittle stone. The _Eventide_'s coilguns pounded the affected area, great clouds of powdery dust billowing out as the hull crumbled away.

There were bodies in the wreckage. Some of them were still moving.

_Point and click. Point and click. Point and click._

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Yep, the Doorstop is back. This update was originally supposed to be larger, but it started getting too large, so I decided to split it. Fortunately, that means much of the second half is done, so that should be showing up relatively soon.

Also, I am so, so sorry for the pun. Not sorry enough not to include it, but still very sorry.


	54. Can't Stop This Thing We Started

**53. Can't Stop This Thing We Started**

Another Arc-en-ciel exploded mid-charge, whiting out the screen, and Fleet Admiral Lindy Harlaown muttered a quick prayer for the departed. Dark shapes appeared in the afterglow; another group of enemy warships burning towards them at combat speed.

"Do we have a lock on the largest ship in that formation?" she asked.

Her weapons officer nodded. "Aye, ma'am."

"Good. Fleet Admiral Harlaown to Task Force _Dolga_, Second Command is counterattacking. Tenth Heavy, Eighteenth Assault, clear us a path."

Two squadrons of capital ships raced ahead of the _Dolga_, lighting up the Chaos ships' shields with a volley of magical firepower. The enemy responded in kind, their formation loosening as they moved to engage their tormentors.

Lindy smiled a disconcertingly mild smile. "I believe that's our route up ahead. Helm, take us in."

The heavy cruiser accelerated towards a gap between three frigates, its wards glowing as it entered their line of fire.

"We're taking hits, ma'am," Weapons noted unnecessarily.

"So I see. Well, I suppose I couldn't put off trying this thing out forever. Enhanced Magical Interface System, open."

The Magical Interface System was a powerful weapon, but not without its drawbacks. A mage who used it would have their power magnified enormously, but it supplied nothing itself, meaning that its effects depended entirely on the mage operating it, and the imperfections of the interface between a human Linker Core and such a massive Device severely limited its operating time. The Bureau had come some way in making it more efficient, but, to analogise, there was a reason why people had stopped using levers and hand-pulleys and started using electric winches.

The _Dolga_'s prototype EMIS was the metaphorical electric winch. It backed up the user with two specialised magical reactors, tremendously boosting their abilities without them having to exert the slightest bit of effort, and letting the system operate almost indefinitely. In the hands of a raw recruit, it was deadly. In the hands of an experienced S-rank mage like Lindy, it was terrifying.

Or, at least, that was the sales pitch. They still needed to find out whether it would actually work.

Lindy rested her hands on the control crystals, feeling the power held within rush through her body. "_Dolga_, Mirage Defenser."

A blue mist encased the heavy cruiser, coiling and writhing like a living creature. The dark lance beams and disintegrator bolts simply bent around it, either flying past harmlessly or turning back to strike the ships that had fired them. One frigate's shield collapsed, its own weapons slicing glowing rents across its hull.

_Well, that's promising._ Lindy drew on more of her own power, the four opal bindis on her forehead glowing as a series of transparent turquoise ovals like the wings of a butterfly emerged from her back.

"_Dolga_, Sunlight Wing."

Vastly larger versions of the butterfly-wings flapped outwards from the heavy cruiser's sides and it surged forwards, arrowing in on the battleship at the heart of the enemy group.

The fleet admiral breathed in, focusing on her target and letting her consciousness expand through every room, every corridor, and every pipeline in its structure. "_Dolga_, Summer Rain."

Thousands of glowing turquoise butterflies appeared throughout the titanic ship, gently flapping their wings as they hovered next to (or, in some cases, inside) power conduits, antimatter regulators, damage-control systems, and ammunition stores. Then Lindy lifted a hand from its crystal and clicked her fingers, and each and every one of them exploded.

The blasts were not terribly large or terribly powerful. Most of them, in fact, would barely serve to knock someone down. Even an expert mage with the might of the EMIS at her disposal was not without her limitations, and Lindy liked to economise anyway. They were, however, very, very carefully placed.

The battleship shuddered, its windows aglow for an instant with the light of distant flames. Then it ripped itself apart.

_Note to self: Enhanced Magical Interface System appears to be functioning quite well._

"Hey, what're they up to?" Sensors asked.

"I beg your pardon, lieutenant?"

"The Chaos ships, ma'am. Look – they're acting weird."

He was right. The enemy formation had been loose before, but in a purposeful, organised way. Now, it was falling apart. Some of the ships were maintaining a semblance of fighting order, but others were veering off into parts unknown, charging suicidally into the Bureau fleet, or even opening fire on their own allies. One of the larger battlecruisers had actually shut down, floating unhurriedly through the void with its lights off, its weapons silent (in another example of the Warp getting things wrong, they _had_ been making a faint noise), and its engines dead as three TSAB ships pounded into it at once.

"And all this started when we destroyed their battleship?" Lindy asked.

"Seems that way, ma'am."

"Interesting. Brief anyone you can, please – I'd like to know if this was a one-off, or part of a pattern."

"I'll see what I can do, ma'am," the communications officer replied, "but we might have a problem. Our comms are having trouble reaching the rest of the fleet, and their maximum range is shrinking fast. The people we can talk to can relay it, sure, but it'll take a little longer."

"Slow is better than never, Simca. Go ahead."

A new set of symbols flashed across the tactical display – the enemy had broken through their lines to the south. They had engaged their allies. Lindy hoped their alien friends would be able to fend for themselves, because as the sensors cleared, showing another three groups bearing down on her, she knew that they would have to.

* * *

The Spiral Driver control chair (version 2.0) was a skeletal, mildly uncomfortable affair that reached over its occupant like the legs of a spider. In addition to the usual paraphernalia of a captain's post, it incorporated seatbelts, padded safety bars, and two spiral-shaped gauges in the right-hand arm rest. One indicated how much power the ship was drawing from the hundreds of bodged-together alien weapons bolted onto it. The other showed the level of system instability you were currently experiencing – in layman's terms, how likely your ship was to turn into something horrible, eat you alive, and then kill everyone else within the next couple of thousand kilometres.

To say that Captain Jean-Luc Picard disliked it was to miss a perfectly good opportunity to use the word 'loathed'. The fact that it closely resembled Borg technology (especially when one took into account all the green glowy bits) didn't help either.

At the moment, the warning gauge was empty save for a sullen flicker of purple at the bottom, but the power gauge was half-full of green light. This was because Picard was currently fending off a broadside from an enemy ship five times the size of the _Enterprise-E_ with nothing but the power of his mind.

Therein, of course, lay the most annoying aspect of Spiral Driver technology – it worked. It worked well.

During the Year of Chaos, the Federation had finally gone on the offensive against the _Stiletto_, luring it into a trap above the skies of Aldebaran where three whole fleets lay in ambush. Starfleet had fielded a hundred and fifty ships, three times as many as they had sent against the Borg at the disastrous battle of Wolf 359, and all of them had been armed to the teeth with their nation's latest and deadliest weapons. Captain Rong-Arya and her crew had destroyed them all except for the third fleet's flagship, which had been returned to them with its crew turned into living furniture and the admiral commanding it crucified across the outer hull.

In the last ten minutes, Picard and the other five captains of his squadron had destroyed three Chaos warships, all of which were bigger, tougher, and decades more advanced than the _Stiletto_, whilst taking only two losses in return.

The battle was nightmarish, brutal. Here, a swarm of daemons was peeling away a cruiser's hull to get at the soft, tasty people inside. There, a heavy escort partially transformed by its Spiral Drivers had grabbed an enemy ship with a long, many-jointed arm that had once been a warp nacelle, hitting it again and again with two other, less recognisable limbs. The two ships they had lost had died in rapid succession – some nameless _something_ had boarded the USS _Hudson_, consuming it from the inside out in lurid pink fire, which had distracted Captain Grigorovich of the USS _New Hope_ sufficiently for a Chaos frigate to get past his Spiral Driver barrier and slice his ship in half lengthwise. Between them, the two ships had carried well over a thousand crewmembers. None of them had escaped.

Despite this, though, despite the carnage and madness, they were holding. They were facing the enemy that had effortlessly ravaged their galaxy, now returned a thousand times stronger, and they were meeting it head-on.

The alien sensations from the control chair changed in pitch and timbre, the power gauge bulging outwards as the _Enterprise_'s barrier absorbed the energy of the incoming shots. Picard knew what that feeling meant. He shoved the handgrips forward, shaping the wall of energy into a titanic, drill-like lance, and loosed it at the enemy cruiser.

The Chaos ship's shields shattered, chunks of metal flaking away from its hull and fires burning within the gouges scraped across its surface, but it held. Clearly, more measures would be necessary.

"Mr. Daniels, fire phasers."

The tactical officer blinked. "Sir, we had our phasers replaced with those time-traveller plasma cannons, remember? Everyone in the fleet did."

"I am aware of that, lieutenant. Now, if you would kindly permit an old man his eccentricities, fire phasers."

"… Of course, sir. Firing phasers, aye."

The _Enterprise_'s plasma cannons fired, raking across the cruiser's hull. The bolts were a singularly disappointing (if unsurprising) shade of green.

Picard tapped his com-badge. "How are we doing, Mr. La Forge?"

"Pretty OK, sir," the chief of engineering's voice replied. "One bit of concern, though – the Spiral Drivers. If I may say so, sir, you're running them at kind of a low output."

"I apologise, Mr. La Forge, but you are aware of the horror stories from the New Republic, yes? I would rather if we did not experience a 'Code Indigo' or whatever those gentlemen from the Bureau are calling it now."

"Yeah, I get that, but we can raise the safe threshold, remember? All we have to do is transfor-"

"I will pretend you did not say that, commander. We have already given enough to this war effort, and I do not think it necessary to sacrifice the last shreds of our dignity in some flashy, ridiculous…"

"Yeah, I see where you're coming from, sir, but, and I really don't mean to preach here, if we're going to have to choose between dignity and staying alive…"

Picard sighed and rested his head in his hand. "Very well. You've made your point. Perhaps some modifications to the warp nacelles?"

"Sure thing, sir. Don't worry, I'm sure I can keep it tasteful. Always wondered what they'd look like in green, and maybe we could have some little drills on the tips…"

"_Thank you_, commander."

"Right, sir. Sorry, sir. Shutting up now, sir."

The captain returned to gazing balefully at the main screen. Acting as glorified weapons platforms for the Bureau and their allies was one thing, but did they have to rub it in like that? More than ever, he was glad that he'd decided to leak the information about Spiral Driver side-effects to the rest of the Alpha Quadrant forces. Their current situation was humiliating, but it could well have been deadly.

Somewhere in the distance, another Starfleet ship exploded. _More deadly, anyway._

* * *

The _Errant Venture_, like most Imperial-II Star Destroyers, had a long and complicated history. It had participated in the Battle of Endor, served in the Imperial remnant fleet led by the former Director of Intelligence Ysanne Isard, been captured by the notorious smuggler Booster Terrik during a joint operation with the New Republic in 7 ABY, and spent the next decade or so as an enormous, heavily-armed mobile black market. It had had many adventures during that time, not least of which was a recent incident involving some politically-unfortunate documents that had led to the New Republic and what was left of the Galactic Empire ceasing hostilities, and the _Errant Venture_ getting a makeover that included a full refit, several extra turbolaser turrets, and lots and lots of red paint.

Then the Time-Space Administration Bureau had shown up, and with them, conclusive proof that there were other universes to explore, talk to, and, most importantly, trade with. Due to the continuing war against the Yuuzhan Vong, the Republic had been forced to rely on volunteers to bulk out its contribution to Operation Guardian (or, at least, that was the excuse Chancellor Fey'lya had given), and Booster and the crew of the _Venture_ had been amongst the first to sign up to seek their fortune.

It was doubtful, in the opinion of General Wedge Antilles, that they had been expecting seeking their fortune to involve quite so much fighting for their lives against the legions of hell. Nevertheless, they seemed to be taking to it rather well.

"Lay down a turbolaser barrage to our port!" Booster yelled, his face turning almost as red as the hull of his ship. "I said port, damn it! Your _other_ port! Kriffing hell, can't a single one of you inbred mynock-suckers shoot straight?"

The _Venture_'s gunners seemed to be doing a perfectly good job from where Wedge was standing, but then again, he wasn't paying their bills. In fact, he wasn't doing much of anything at the moment – the New Republic wasn't stupid enough to let an unruly bunch of semi-criminals represent them on a multiversal level without _some_ supervision, and since he was a senior officer with extensive prior dealings with the Terrik family, that meant that it was his job to stand around and look responsible whilst everyone else had all the fun.

The Chaos raiders had struck the New Republic fleet fifteen minutes ago, punching a hole through their outer lines and wreaking havoc in their vulnerable innards. They had overextended themselves, though, and the position that made it so easy for them to hit the invaders where it hurt also rendered retreat almost impossible. In short, the time was right for a counterattack, and that was precisely what Booster and his flotilla of smugglers were doing.

"We've cleared out that daemon swarm, boss," one of what could tentatively be described as the _Venture_'s 'bridge officers' reported. "Looks like we've got a clear run right up their hellspawned arses."

Booster grunted in satisfaction. "Good. Now let's see if we got value for money for our new toys from those Bureau shysters. Spiral Drivers, engage!"

Wedge glanced out of the bridge's massive transparisteel window, watching long, glowing fins rise out of the broad red triangle that was the _Errant Venture_'s hull. He could see the Chaos ships in the distance – small, malevolent pinpricks on the disconcertingly colourful backdrop of the Warp. Green fire raced along the surface of the ship, forming a solid barrier as the first probing shots from the enemy zipped past.

"Drivers at thirty per cent power and rising," an orange-skinned Twi'lek said. "System is stable."

A narrow black beam smacked into the barrier with no discernible effect.

"… and no damage to the shields," she continued. "Impressive."

"OK, now let's check out what it can do to our offence," Booster said. "Antilles, your flyboys finished doing their make-up yet?"

Wedge didn't mind the old smuggler's abrasive tone – after the first decade or so, you got used to it. "My 'flyboys' launched ten minutes ago. They've probably saved your life a couple of hundred times by now."

The scar around Booster's clone-grown left eye creased as he grinned. "Only that many? Getting sloppy. Hope they're gonna step up their game soon, because I'm about to send a whole lot more work their way. Dizrok, I want a full spread in front of us. Target that big yellow bastard at oh-one-three. He wanted to scratch our nice new coat of paint, so we'll scratch his."

Star Destroyer turbolaser bolts were green as a matter of default. The Spiral Driver enhancements, however, made them look even greener – and much, much brighter. Wedge was left blinking away afterimages as the light faded.

"Their energy readings took a dip there, boss," a long-necked Ithorian wheezed. "We didn't break their shield, but we certainly dented it."

"Then hit 'em again, damn it!" Booster roared. "Do I have to do all the thinking around here? And for kriff's sake, tell me our main gun's charging. I don't want this to be a repeat of that time with the Vong over Ithor."

"Affirmative, sir," the Twi'lek said. "Ready in three… two… one…"

"_Wonderful_. Antilles, you're going to want to see this…"

The emerald barrier across the front of the ship parted, a small hole appearing around the tip of the prow. The floor beneath Wedge's feet started to vibrate faintly, a low whine creeping up through the massive Star Destroyer's many decks.

Booster gave a lazy smile. "Fire."

A massive, spiralling beam shot out from the Errant Venture's prow, seeming to twist and writhe almost playfully before it struck one of the larger enemy ships, which abruptly ceased to exist.

The explosion was quite spectacular.

"Booster…" Wedge said slowly, "be honest with me now. Was that a kriffing _superlaser_?"

"Hah, you kidding? You really think I could worm a bona fide superlaser out of those Nal Hutta jobsworths? Nah – it's a laser, and it's pretty super, but it's not a superlaser, if you follow me. Figured I might as well treat myself after that run-in with those celebrity impersonators we had. Nei, how long until it's ready to fire again?"

"Seven minutes, sir, and that's if we-"

Something exploded off the _Venture_'s starboard bow, causing the Spiral Driver barrier to ripple alarmingly.

"Don't think we have that long," Booster growled. "Ah, well, I was hoping I'd get to try this anyway. Hold on to something solid, people, and have the fighters get out of the way – I'm taking this thing to maximum power."

Wedge didn't need telling twice – he knew what that meant. He strapped himself into the nearest chair and clung to the arm-rests for dear life, staring out of the window as he waited for the insanity to begin. Dark shapes were gathering in the distance as the Chaos group began to react to the _Venture_'s charge, tracing the space between them with a jagged nightmare of glowing black and the occasional bright flash of an antimatter blast. The green fire surrounding the ship flared, shape and colour fading away as the Spiral Drivers roared and the hull screamed in protest.

There was movement outside. With a lurch in his stomach, Wedge realised that the massive delta of the Star Destroyer's body was dipping away from them. In fact, it was no longer accurate to call it a delta – the broad triangle was splitting lengthwise, the two halves crumpling and spreading in an eerily organic manner.

_Legs. We have legs now._

The red expanse retreated, mercifully, out of sight, but Wedge could still hear the noises, see the way that the barrier moulded around the ship's new form. The view from the window shifted left, then right, and he gradually noticed that the rest of the ship wasn't moving with them.

Something long and crimson moved in front of them, angled near the middle and tapering to a point at one end. The point opened into five smaller protrusions, one shorter than the others. The Star Destroyer brought its arm to its face, and flexed its fingers experimentally.

"… Huh," Booster said. "Looks like the paint's still intact. Good. You would not _believe_ what I paid for that. Oh, and we weren't all crushed to death. That's good, too, I guess."

As if on cue, an alarm sounded.

"Another torpedo spread coming in, boss!" the Ithorian called. "Our fighter screen's trying its best, but there's too many of them."

The smuggler grinned, and leaned back in his command chair. "Not for long there aren't."

The _Venture_'s arm flicked forward, a shallow cone of green energy spreading out and away from its palm. Torpedo after torpedo struck it, bursting into brilliant white light… and froze, staying in place like a dozen infant suns. The transformed ship's massive fingers closed, pulling the raging antimatter together into a single incandescent sphere.

"Kolash," Booster said mildly, "who fired that at us?"

The Ithorian's long, thin fingers stroked his custom-made keyboard. "Modified light cruiser, boss. Bearing three-four-seven. You see it?"

"That I do. Hey, buddy, you dropped this…"

The _Venture_ made a sharp gesture, and the antimatter sphere collapsed into an impossibly long lance, reaching across the thousands of kilometres between them to impale the cruiser lengthwise. For a nanosecond, the world hung in a frozen, perfect tableau, and then the Chaos ship disintegrated.

A pair of escorts moved to flank them, criss-crossing space with waves of midnight death. The _Venture_ jinked to one side, throwing Wedge against his seatbelt, and charged forward. Through the window, he saw the leftmost frigate rapidly increase in size, all spikes, gothic arches, and eye-hurting runes, as the Star Destroyer's own guns met its desperate attempts to defend itself in a sea of green-and-black explosions. Its shield went down when they were barely two hundred metres away and then the _Venture_'s head twisted to one side and Wedge had a brief glimpse of a massive red arm coming forward and then there was nothing but technicoloured fire as the transformed ship shoulder-barged through its enemy at eighty kilometres per second.

The _Venture_ flipped tail-over-head, facing the second frigate upside down. It raised its hands, fanning out a broad green drill like an umbrella as its enemy opened fire, the torrent of Warp-infused energy glancing off harmlessly. The drill began to spin, chewing through the fabric of space itself until all that was left was a hole two kilometres wide, which the Star Destroyer promptly stepped through.

* * *

Captain Pierre Leclerc did not need any of his crew to alert him when the scarlet colossus rematerialised a scant few hundred metres from his ship. This was because he _was_ his ship. His spirit was bound into its hull – its adamantium armour was its skin, its thousands of lesser daemons and servitors were his neurons, and its sensors were his eyes. All he had to do to notice it was look up… and up… and up.

The enemy ship stood two kilometres tall now, towering over his own frigate. It was loosely humanoid, covered in massive, triangular armour plates and cloaked in green fire. Its squashed-hexagon head looked down at him, its broad, flat face totally featureless. For the first time in his second life, Pierre was frightened.

Like most of Chaos's ascended daemons, Pierre had been long-dead when the gods had conscripted him into their army. He had once been a captain in the service of King Louis, where his ship-of-the-line, the _Magnifique_, had been quite a thorn in the side of the perfidious British until an incident with a sandbar and a couple too many bottles of Bordeaux had brought both his career and his life to an abrupt and messy end. A fast learner and creative tactician, he had adapted unusually well to his return a couple of centuries later, which might have been due in part to space's dearth of sandbars and his new body's total alcohol immunity.

He was kind to his crew (even if they were a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters spawned from the literal depths of hell), he was popular with the kids at Bloodhaven's communal nursery, and whilst he did like to slope off on weekends and do strange and disturbing things to upstanding (or, occasionally, horizontal) members of the public, he always made sure he had their informed, enthusiastic consent beforehand, and most of them remained pretty enthusiastic afterwards. In short, he didn't really deserve what was about to happen to him.

The _Magnifique II_'s engines howled as Pierre diverted all the power he could to them, desperately trying to put some personal space between him and the giant intruder. The transformed ship, for its part, simply reached out and grabbed it with both hands, its thumbs sinking into the upper hull. Pierre screamed in pain, feeling his skin slowly peel back as the frigate forced itself forward. Something would give soon, he knew, and he and his ship would be free, but it wouldn't happen nearly fast enough. He needed to loosen his enemy's grip.

Every gun on the frigate's starboard side fired at once, lashing into its enemy at point-blank range. The giant hands relaxed for a moment, the pain lessened, and for one brief, glorious instant, Pierre thought he had done it. Then his sensors cleared, showing the transformed ship again. Its armour was chipped, blackened, and scarred, but it was still intact, still glowing with the unholy light of the Spiral.

Pierre Leclerc had just enough time to order a general evacuation before the _Errant Venture_, the New Republic's only privately-owned Star Destroyer, snapped the _Magnifique II_ in half over its knee.

* * *

Wedge turned away from the exploding frigate, and back towards the command chair. "How the _hell_ did you do all that?"

"Antilles," Booster replied, "I have absolutely no idea."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Been a while since I read the X-Wing books. Not completely sure I got Wedge and booster down, but still good to work with them.

Also, I swear Picard is eventually going to catch a break. At some point. Maybe. Possibly.


	55. Bat Out Of Hell

**54. Bat Out Of Hell**

Rong-Arya gazed at the map, watching symbols vanish one by one. The current casualty rate was acceptable, but still a bit high, and whilst they had lost few of the all-important control vessels so far, the number was rising with disquieting speed.

In building their fleet, Chaos's shipwrights had run into one major problem – they needed to match the numbers of the enemy, and whilst the gods' powers and the mining operations in the Stargate universe gave them the time and resources they needed, they didn't have anywhere near enough people to crew all their ships. As a result, they'd had to compromise, crewing most of their ships with daemons (both ascended and the more numerous but increasingly unpredictable crafted) and mindless, cloned servitor-cyborgs. The fleet was divided into groups of roughly thirty, each led by a large, heavily-armed, and well-defended control ship whose human, daemonhost, and ascended officers would try to keep the rest of the group pointed in the right direction.

Unfortunately, this still left them with a major, obvious weakness, and it seemed the enemy had begun to figure it out.

"All groups, they know about the control ships. Respond accordingly. I'll leave the details up to you, but whilst the Suzumiyaverse devices are an option of last resort, they are still an option."

There was another problem – the enemy hadn't taken the bait she'd laid out for them yet, and as her window of opportunity closed, the trap she'd set remained unsprung. Fortunately, this was rather more easily solvable.

The map also showed the current state of the Warp, colour-coded according to the severity of the 'weather' in that strange and alien realm. Dark red smears covered the battlefield, each indicating a particularly heavy bit of turbulence created by her sorcery cadre. As she watched, another one slowly began to emerge in the heart of the allied fleet.

_Just what I was looking for._

* * *

The X-wing starfighter banked sharply, the G-forces squeezing its pilot back into his seat. A screeching, winged shape drifted across his heads-up display, and his thumb tapped the firing stud on his control stick. The four laser cannons lit up, sending streamers of crimson fire across the howling Warp… and missed. Again.

Not for the first time, Corran Horn wondered how he'd been talked into this.

One of the first things the New Republic had learned about the other universes that had intruded on their own was that the Force didn't exist in them. The Jedi, being entirely concerned with understanding and manipulating the Force, had naturally been rather curious about this – or, to be blunter, Master Luke Skywalker was trying to figure out what the hell it meant before his entire Order schismed over the philosophical implications.

The problem was that their entire contact with those other universes had been in the context of a colossal interdimensional war, meaning that militarily-useful personnel were far more likely to get a chance at obtaining an exit visa. Jedi without the Force, as a whole, were nothing more than pacifist monks armed with hideously impractical flashlight-swords, and were only militarily-useful if you wanted to distract the enemy with a really _creative_ suicide.

The important part, of course, was the 'as a whole'.

Corran had always been a bit of an oddity in the Jedi Order. In an organisation that mostly recruited children and teenagers, he had joined in his early thirties, after a long and distinguished career with the New Republic Navy's legendary Rogue Squadron. In fact, he had only become a full-time member of the Temple six months ago after spending almost a decade juggling his duties as a Rogue and a Jedi, foolishly believing that he would finally be able to relax in peace. On the one hand, this meant that the more traditional Jedi tended to look at him as if he was about to turn to the dark side at any minute. On the other, it meant that he had combat experience with Rogue Squadron – in other words, he was militarily-useful.

Or, at least, he was supposed to be.

Whilst he had only been a Jedi for a small fraction of his life, Corran had been using the Force unconsciously for far longer, and it was not until he left his home universe that he began to realise just how much he'd relied on it. His simulator scores on the way to Bloodhaven had been abysmal, and his hopes that he'd fare differently in real combat had been swiftly dashed. It was like losing a sense, feeling only a blank emptiness that had once been filled with light and life. He was missing shots that he could once have hit in his sleep, whilst taking hits that a first-year academy student should have been able to dodge. If not for his gradually failing shield and for the increasingly-shrill warnings from his astromech droid, Whistler, he would have been dead a dozen times over.

It wasn't just a lack of skill, though. He was Rogue Squadron, one of the best-trained pilots in the Republic, mentored under legends like Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu. Given enough time, he should have been able to compensate and adapt, even if he couldn't quite reach the heights he'd once been used to.

It was the Warp, the mad hellscape that had become their battlefield. He couldn't trust his eyes, couldn't tell what was illusion and what was reality. A wall of fire searing across his path might dissipate harmlessly once he was halfway through, or set his little fighter to trembling and his shield gauge to dropping. The physics, too, were askew – being unable to tell what was up or down was perfectly normal for a starfighter pilot, and of no great concern, but Corran often felt the nagging suspicion that up and down _did_ exist here, and wherever they were, he was on the wrong end.

Worst, though, were the sounds. Space was silent, famously so, and the only noises a pilot in combat typically heard were simulated effects electronically pumped into his cockpit to aid his situational awareness. The Warp, though, was not, and even seemed to pervert every sound that passed through it. Whistler's chirps and beeps had an eerie, mocking edge to them. The satisfying _blat-blat-blat_ of the X-wing's lasers had become the sickening thud of a club hitting flesh. The transmissions from his wingmen seemed to be spoken in two voices at once, the second whispering secrets that he knew were true and didn't want to hear. Behind it all, creeping through and digging its claws into his brain, was the wailing, the endless wailing. Sometimes it was a voice he knew, sometimes it didn't even sound human at all, but it was always there, quiet and distant but impossible to ignore.

_This place hates us. It hates us, and it wants to kill us._

There was a truth, there – something useful, important, hammering at the front of his brain – but Corran did not have time to concentrate on it. The daemons were back.

He heard them before he saw them, a chorus of atonal shrieks that seemed to come from every direction at once. Then a dark mass appeared from behind a wisp of Warp-matter, bearing down on him like an avalanche.

The swarm was huge, numbering in the hundreds – far too many for him to take on alone. He opened his comms, trying to contact his fellow-pilots, but found nothing. He checked his sensors. Nothing.

Then they were on him.

Corran pulled back on the stick, lurching his fighter out of the way as the daemons opened fire. Bolts of squirming night slid past centimetres from his shield's outer edge, followed by jets of glowing bile, showers of brightly-coloured sparks, and even stranger things. He zigzagged frantically, sawing the controls from side to side as stray projectiles splashed against his shield and unpromisingly-coloured lights blinked into life on his dashboard. A long wisp of cloud licked out and he dived into it, firing off a shower of photon flares to throw off his pursuers. It would barely even slow them down, he knew, but 'barely' was better than nothing.

"Whistler," he gasped, "where… exactly are we?"

The astromech droid fed him the co-ordinates with a tired, you're-not-going-to-like-this beep. He looked at them. He didn't like them.

Corran had been dimly aware for the past quarter-hour that he might have strayed a little too far from his mothership. He just hadn't realised until now quite how spectacularly lost he was. The _Errant Venture_ was now almost a million kilometres away and headed at high speed in precisely the wrong direction, and the rest of its fighter screen were nowhere to be seen. To make matters worse, he wasn't even that close to the last known positions of any other allied units – in fact, the closest sighting to his current position had been…

_Oh. So that's where the daemons came from._

The clouds parted, and eight kilometres of Chaos battleship hove into view.

Corran's brain shut down. He registered the glowing runes, the thousands of inlaid bones, the row after row of massive, gargoyle-mouthed turrets. He registered the whine of the enormous ship's weapons coming to bear, the hunting calls of the pursuing daemon swarm, and Whistler's desperate, panicked warble. He did not, however, process them in any conscious, intellectual manner.

The first dark lance beam stabbed past, and he dodged. A cluster of daemons swooped in, and he shot them down. A web of unholy light spun around him, each strand capable of inflicting certain death at the slightest touch. He didn't touch them. He didn't flee, suicide, or try to surrender. Instead, the starfighter's four engines glowed like miniature suns as he danced through the maze of fire, drawing ever closer to the titanic battleship.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice began reciting the Jedi Code. It might have been his own.

A flicker of movement, almost too faint for the human eye to detect. A disintegrator turret had drawn a bead on him. The daemons behind him screeched in mindless hunger, clawing at the void as they closed the distance. He shut off the main engines and fired the fighter's retro-thrusters, slamming forward in his seat as the overstrained inertial dampeners failed again. The daemons flew over and past him, slowing slightly as they realised their mistake, before the bolt from the enormous defence cannon incinerated them. A blast of Warp-magic smacked into the X-wing's rear, sending it tumbling end-over-end, and he rode with it, firing the main engines again to turn the roll into a demented, drunken corkscrew.

_There is no emotion. There is peace._

The deaths of their own comrades at their hands did not seem to slow the battleship's gunners down. They lit up the Warp, trying to achieve with saturation what they could not with accuracy. Corran was too close by now, though, under the ship's vast guns and diving into the buttressed, gothic maze that was its surface. He weaved around spires of bone and under barbed, jagged arches, snapping off bursts of laser fire at anything that looked important and/or likely to shoot him down. The vast bulk of the Chaos ship became a wall, a floor, and a ceiling, bulging out in front of him as he approached its aft.

_There is no ignorance. There is knowledge._

A lance beam flashed up behind his fighter, the heat from its passage collapsing its abused shield and melting the rear edge of its upper starboard S-foil. He rolled down and sideways, trying to get closer to the battleship's surface… and ran right into another daemon swarm. There was a moment of pure anarchy, a jumble of wings, eyes, teeth, and deafening screeches, and then he was out and away, spraying flares into what passed for their faces.

_There is no passion. There is serenity._

Whistler's scream was all the warning he had before the daemon-crow's beak slammed into the cockpit, hairline cracks appearing in the transparisteel canopy. It was clinging to the X-wing's back, beating its massive, clawed wings against the fighter's hull as Corran's astromech droid tried vainly to dislodge it with his static probe. It drew back its head for another stab and he shoved the stick to one side, trying to shake it off. There was an outraged squawk and a cloud of rotting feathers, but the daemon refused to budge.

_There is no chaos. There is harmony._

They were approaching a protrusion from the ship's hull, an enormous fin blistered with observation bubbles, held in place by hundreds of seemingly delicate, cobwebbed buttresses that in truth had to each be a metre thick at minimum. Corran dived towards the adamantium maze, paying no heed to the way the massive struts and arches seemed to move in a nonexistent wind. He rolled his fighter onto its side, tapping the button to close the S-foils that gave the X-wing its name. The port foils came together smoothly, forming a single, straight line as the narrow gap drew closer, but the starboard side's damage had taken its toll, and the upper foil's descent was jerky and slow – too slow. The buttresses pressed together, mockingly forming a too-narrow outline of his ship for him to squeeze through.

_There is no death. There is the Force._

Corran fired his proton torpedoes just before his fighter entered their predicted blast radius. The buttresses jerked back, a psychic scream of pain ripping through his forebrain as viscous liquid blossomed out from their chipped adamantium skins. He barrelled through, hearing the reassuring click of the other two S-foils locking into place, and made for the next gap in the maze. It was already closing – not fast enough to catch him, but quite enough to serve his own purposes. He glanced up, seeing his daemon passenger's eyes widen in panic as it realised what he was doing, and then there was only a grey blur and an unpleasant thud as the starfighter slid through the narrow arch with millimetres to spare – and none to spare for a certain unwanted corvid.

His mind was beginning to resume some semblance of its normal functions, ideas and concepts trickling back in and connecting with each other in unusual ways. _I am a Jedi. This place hates us. __Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate…_

They burst out of the buttress-maze, arcing over the broad flank of the battleship's engine block. There were little circles pockmarking the surface, exhaust vents to bleed off excess heat from the reactors. He looked at them, and everything came together.

_The Warp feeds off our emotions. It sends them out of control. It drives us mad. I've seen that before. I know what it is._

_The Warp is the dark side. I am a Jedi. Jedi fight the dark side._

_This ship is an abomination, built for slaughter and terror. It's equal parts weapon and symbol. I know what it is._

_This ship is a superweapon. I am a Rogue. Rogues kill superweapons._

The battleship's point-defences had noticed him again, swinging to bear as yet another daemon-swarm burst from their nests in the shadowy recesses of the hull. They were too late. Corran pulled the stick back, looping out and away from the enemy vessel. He could see the vent below him, see how it snaked down into the battleship's thermonuclear heart. There was a sound playing through the cockpit, text blinking on the screen, but it was not relevant.

The X-wing descended like a blade of divine retribution, torpedo launchers loosing one projectile after another as a storm of black light sleeted overhead. Corran pulled out at the last minute, almost splitting his fighter open on a gnarled spire as he soared skyward again… and shuddered to a halt, just in time to see the last of his torpedoes detonate harmlessly against the secondary void shield across the vent's entrance.

They hung there for a moment, suspended in the tractor beam – _the New Republic tractor beam _– and then the electronic-intrusion alarm sounded and the heads-up display began to shift, reshaping itself into bright red letters.

WE SAW THAT MOVIE TOO, DICKWEED.

The X-wing began moving again, the beam's operators angling it carefully so that its weapons were pointed away from the battleship but its pilot could still see where he was headed. Their destination was a shallow crevice, a crack in the mighty leviathan's skin in which daemons crawled like maggots in a wound. Those that could stare were staring. Those that could grin were grinning.

Corran should have been afraid. He was meant to be afraid. The Warp was goading him, whispering in his ear. Perhaps, once, he would have been, but he was a Jedi now, and he knew where fear led. _Besides, if I die, I become one with the Force. Or the nearest local equivalent._

One of the larger daemons outlined, in remarkably illustrative gestures, precisely what that nearest local equivalent was and how enthusiastic it was about sending Corran to become one with it.

… _Or I could try escaping. Which appears to be totally impossible. Fantastic._

That sound was back again, the same one he'd heard during the abortive attack run against the battleship. For lack of better options, he listened to it.

"… I repeat, this is the Space Grappal _Jiiha_. Green Six, we have received your transmission and will be with you shortly. Do you copy, over?"

_Wait, when did I send a-_

"OK, Judah, I think that idiot's had enough time to get out of the way. THIS ONE'S FOR KAMINA CITY, ASSHOLES!"

A thousand metres of grey-armoured titan burst from the Warp-clouds, trailing streamers of green fire as it emptied its impossibly vast assault rifle into the Chaos battleship's shields. They collapsed in a burst of light, seconds before the towering war-machine's massive, outstretched feet slammed into the daemon-ship's hull in a flying kick that carried enough force to crack a planet.

Corran was already gunning the X-wing's engines when the tractor beam vanished, the Gs hammering into his gut as he steered the fighter through a sky that was suddenly full of tumbling wreckage, barn-sized shell casings, and very surprised daemons.

"And just what," he wheezed, "the _kriff_ was that?"

Whistler gave a beep. A very smug beep. The text he'd seen before flashed on-screen again.

_This is astromech droid R2-R7, on board New Republic fighter Green Six. We have located a Chaos command vessel at the following coordinates. My pilot has gone temporarily insane and engaged the enemy on his own. Help would be appreciated. End transmission._

Corran grinned a woozy grin. "Thanks, Whistler. I owe you one. Again."

Another beep. This one needed no translation.

The Jedi looked out of the window, trying to get his bearings. The _Jiiha_'s charge had blown away the living clouds surrounding them, and the entire battlefield was laid out beneath him. At this distance, it was strangely beautiful, an array of tiny lights that occasionally linked together with little glowing threads before one of them went out. It was easy to forget that each time that happened, hundreds or even thousands of people died… particularly since something kept encouraging him to forget.

"Whistler, can you get me on comms? I think I've figured something out about the Warp, and I'd like to talk to someone high-ranking about it."

A mournful whistle.

"Network difficulties? You got a bead on what's causing… no, no, wait. I see it."

A dark bruise was spreading in the heart of the allied fleet, one light after another blinking out as they were caught in its inky grasp. The massive armada's formation started to break up, its ships' movements becoming messy and uncoordinated as their enemies pressed in with even more ruthless ferocity.

_Well, that doesn't look good._

There was a flash of golden light in the heart of the Warp-cloud. Then another.

"Whistler, magnify."

The view through the canopy distorted as the augmented-reality cockpit display zoomed in, lurching vertiginously towards the hell-storm below. The next flash he saw was still distant, still indistinct, but familiar despite the few times he had seen it beforehand. It was the light of reality pouring into the Warp, the light of a ship arriving from realspace… and it was fairly obvious who that ship and all those that accompanied it belonged to.

Corran thumbed the comm button. "_Jiiha_, you're going to want to see this…"

Another light blinked out. He hoped it wasn't the _Venture_.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Speaking of characters from the X-Wing series...

With Corran, I needed an 'air support' perspective for upcoming events, and since poor old Wedge is stuck behind the front lines, he seemed to fit nicely. You'll be seeing a bit more of him later.


	56. Downbound Train

**55. Downbound Train**

A TSAB cruiser exploded, the backwash splashing against the battered wards of the _Void's Wrath_. The Chaos formation ground forward, the trio of battleships at its heart spewing carnage in all directions as their escorts shielded them with an impenetrable web of fire.

"Assault squadrons, keep 'em busy!" Fleet Admiral Thundra yelled. "Fourth Heavy, get that barrier up and give us some elbow room, Kaiser damn it!"

He turned to his bridge crew, slamming his fist into the desk to get their attention. "Weapons, charge the Arc-en-ciels for full bombardment. I want us ready to atomise those daemon bastards as soon as the heavies have their barrier in place. Comms, where the _fuck_ is the rest of my fleet?"

The communications officer looked up, her face grey and wan. "Sorry, sir, still no luck. This storm is playing hell with our systems. I can barely reach a few thousand klicks without running into interference. Best I can say is-"

"Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra, if I may?" Kimidori piped up.

Whilst the admiral disliked having his conversations interrupted, and disliked having them interrupted by one of the Entity's minions even more, it was seldom wise to pass up a Humanoid Interface's advice. "Yeah, what is it?"

"The communications problem. I believe I can help."

"Go on…"

"Our primary purpose, as I have mentioned before, is to gather information, but that is useless if we are unable to disseminate it to the rest of the Entity. As a result, our inter-unit communications are quite sophisticated. If necessary, we can transport any message you care to… ah. One moment, it appears my counterpart aboard the BSS _Dolga _has reached a similar conclusion. Establishing two-way audio link now."

The green-haired girl paused for a moment, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she began speaking in the voice of Lindy Harlaown.

"Hi, professor, sorry I couldn't get in touch earlier. Secondary storms have started cropping up across the battlefield, and we're bogged down on multiple fronts without many ways to coordinate a proper counter-attack. The Spiral Drivers are working well, but they're evening the fight more than giving us a serious advantage, and whilst shooting the big ships seems to disrupt the enemy's movements, we haven't been able to exploit that weakness as much as we'd like. They seem to have figured out that the game's up, and we lost the Ninth Assault and a couple of Space Grappals to an ambush when they used one of their battleships as bait."

There was a pause. Thundra stared at the Interface. The pause continued.

"Um… you can just speak normally, sir," Lindy added helpfully. "Imagine I'm in the room with you."

"Right. Got it. Any good news, then?"

"One thing. I think I've figured out where the enemy's coming from." She sounded hesitant, almost embarrassed. Kimidori, miming her body language, seemed more expressive than he'd ever seen her.

"Yeah?"

"Professor… when we arrived in this sector, did anyone check the local realspace? Anyone at all?"

"Nah, didn't seem to be much point to it. The Warp's where their ships have the greatest advantage, and they always strike from there, so… oh, bugger." Thundra mentally kicked himself. _That's what you get for assuming a bunch of lunatics who call themselves 'Chaos' are going to be predictable, I guess._

Kimidori-as-Lindy's expression was irritatingly sympathetic. "Think we should send a scouting force over, then?"

"A _big_ scouting force. No risks – we have no idea what kind of nasty surprises they've got waiting on the other side. We'll need to alert the other fleet commanders, establish breach protocols, set up reserves to drop in if the first wave runs into …"

"Um, sir?" the communications officer cut in. ""This just got relayed to us across a few dozen short hops. It's from the Klingons. Putting it on-screen now."

A large, dreadlocked Klingon appeared on the main viewer, glaring at them from under bushy eyebrows. Klingons were natural glarers, but this one seemed to be putting some extra effort into it.

"I am General Talash, ranking officer for the Empire since Marshal Qo'goth's demise at the hands of the honourless Chaos filth thirty minutes ago," he said. "We have received multiple reports that Chaos ships are invading from realspace. As a snivelling Bureau _pataq'_, it is our expectation that you will react to this by blathering inconsequentially for the next few hours before selling us some poisoned _racht_-bowl of a 'superweapon' and throwing us in front of you to fight and die on your behalf, and so we have chosen to spare you the effort and mount a full assault on the vermin ourselves. If you wish to reclaim some shred of honour, you may follow us, learn how true warriors fight, and perhaps take care of the mangled leavings we scatter behind us. Either way, the stars will soon run red with daemon blood. Talash out."

The screen went dark. Thundra and the Interface looked at each other.

"… they're all going to die, aren't they?" Lindy said faintly.

"_Oh_ yeah. Harlaown, you're closer. Round up any ships you can spare, and see if you can save those idiots from themselves. I'll hold the line on this side."

"Roger that."

Thundra turned back to the advancing Chaos ships. Pleasingly, the Arc-en-ciels were now almost fully charged. He had a lot of frustration to work out.

* * *

The first Klingon vessels screamed out of the Warp into the heart of the Chaos fleet, Spiral Driver barriers lighting up as over a thousand warships opened fire on them. They responded in kind, lashing out at their assailants with showers of plasma bolts, waves of Spiral-enhanced torpedoes, and walls of searing green fire, but it was not enough. For every Chaos ship they destroyed, they lost three of their own, and there were far more of the enemy than there were of them.

Admiral Rong-Arya watched through the windows of the _New Syracuse _as the last of the Klingon vanguard charged towards them, howling out their death-songs across every available frequency. Dark energy lashed against their massed shields, picking off one craft after another, but they kept coming, carving through escorts and crippling ships-of-the-line with devastating coordinated Driver blasts. The admiral gestured, and two squadrons of daemon-crewed frigates bulled into the Klingons' flanks, forcing their formation apart as they scrambled to confront the new threat and leaving them easy prey for the main fleet's guns.

Soon, all that was left was the vanguard's command ship, a slabby, bulky Negh'Var that shone like a newborn sun as it shrugged aside attacks that should have destroyed it ten times over. Its form rippled, Spiral Energy racing along the length of its hull as it brought its massive, newly-forged guns to bear on the _New Syracuse_. It fired, double-helix beams raking the dreadnought's shields with the raw energies of creation and forcing Rong-Arya to shield her eyes from the glare.

"Ooh, that was a big one. How much did we lose, Choi?"

"Ten per cent shield strength, ma'am," the tech-priest said. "Pretty impressive when you consider it took ten of those things firing at once to dip the _Stiletto_'s shields by point one."

She nodded. "Yep. Can't blame 'em for thinking that's going to win the war for them. Are the torpedoes ready, commander?"

"Aye, ma'am," Ichiro-Faust replied. "One plague-bomb each."

"Good. Tube Seven, right in their faces."

The _Syracuse_ fired a single torpedo, the vast metal cylinder winding lazily toward the enemy ship. The Negh'Var flicked out a contemptuous spray of plasma bolts and the missile rolled around it, flying to within a few hundred metres of the Klingon vessel before exploding in a cloud of sickly yellowish-brown. Too late, the Klingons tried to turn away, and then the cloud engulfed them.

The effect was instantaneous. Rust swept over the hull, the glow of its Spiral Drivers flickering and dying as great chunks of armour crumbled away into dust. The ship tumbled for a moment, sloughed-away debris shrouding it like flies around a dying man, and then the Chaos flagship's dark lances burst it into powder.

Rong-Arya turned away, smiling happily as a new constellation of green lights marked the arrival of the Klingons' second wave.

_I really must remember to get some pictures for Cassie. She'd have loved this._

* * *

The _Eventide_ drifted, engines off and emissions cut to almost zero. Its Magical Interface System had gone into its recharge cycle, and with a TSAB warship's primary medium-range weapon offline, standard operational policy was to slip back behind friendly lines, make yourself as unobtrusive as possible, and repair and resupply everything that needed repairing and resupplying until you were ready to go back out again. Until recently, Hayate had been quite comfortable with this aspect of standard operational policy – it reduced the odds on her and her crew dying, and not dying was generally a positive. When she had actually had to put it into practice for the first time, though, she had hesitated, and it had taken two reminders from Lieutenant Rostov before she finally pulled the _Eventide_ back.

Fighting was easy. Not in the sense of the skill it took to accomplish – she had been strained to her limits calculating shot trajectories, predicting the enemy's movements, and co-ordinating her squadron through the anarchic nightmare that the battle had devolved into. It was easy in that it required more instinct than thought, in that it was clear what you needed to do and you had plenty to keep you busy. You could turn your brain off, put aside tricky little questions like _how many people __did I just kill?_, or _did I know someone on that frigate?_.

She stared at the maintenance logs, trying to lose herself in them as she had in the mayhem of the front lines. It wasn't working quite so well.

_I need to see Shamal. She'll have some answers. That's her job, isn't it?_

Hayate was reaching for the medbay button when the Humanoid Interface to her left rolled her eyes back and started speaking in completely the wrong voice.

"Colonel Yagami, report," Admiral Harlaown said through Yuki Nagato's mouth.

This was not the first time this had happened. Though communicating through Humanoid Interfaces was a very new idea, it had been swiftly adopted by the allied fleet through lack of better options, and the _Eventide_ had received three messages in the past quarter-hour. It hadn't started looking any less disturbing, though.

"Ninth Scouting is resupplying, ma'am," Hayate said. "We've lost the _Spirit_ and the _Fury_, and the _Valiant_ is crippled. Our remaining ships are in good fighting order, though, if low on ammunition and MIS power, and should be ready to advance in ten minutes. Seventh Scouting took heavier losses than us, and is requesting that we merge our squadrons to retain battlefield effectiveness."

"Authorised, but your orders have changed. We discovered the main Chaos fleet hiding in realspace, and our allies… mounted an impromptu assault. You'll be providing support. Go in fast and quiet, map out the enemy battle-lines, and see if you can disrupt them a little. Entry point may be unsecured, so proceed accordingly. I'll be honest, things aren't looking good over there, so sooner would be better than later if you can manage it."

Hayate saluted. "Aye, ma'am."

Yuki lifted her head. "One other thing. The ships you lost… any survivors?"

"…Negative, ma'am. The _Spirit_ launched pods, but… the daemons got to them before we did." _And we heard it. Right through the hull, from a thousand kilometres away. We heard all of it._

"… I see. I'm sorry, Hayate. Be safe. Admiral Harlaown out."

Yuki blinked, and slumped back in her chair.

"We may need to pick up the pace a bit, ma'am," Lieutenant Rostov said. "The battle-line to our east is getting pushed back – the bad guys have brought in a half-dozen heavy squadrons, and they're piling on the pressure."

Hayate pushed her private thoughts away, shamefacedly glad of the opportunity to do so. "How much of a problem are we looking at here?"

"Growing, but containable. Admiral Harlaown has already deployed a few extra ships to tie them up, so this is more of a heads-up than a we-need-to-get-out-of-here-right-now thing. Still, thought it was worth mentioning."

"Good call, lieutenant." She thumbed the button for the cargo-hold. "Bridge to Captain Krebs, how are we-"

"Holy _crap_!"

Rostov sighed. "I take it, Sensors, that the situation to our east just dropped the 'containable' qualifier?"

"You could say that, sir. They've – nah, it'd be better to show you. Borrowing the main screen, ma'am."

Hayate closed her comm-link. "Authorised."

The ship status diagram on the monitor blinked away, replaced by an image of local space. The sensors officer had foregone the usual convention of replacing ships with oversized symbols denoting their rough locations, and the battlefield was instead a sea of tiny, near-imperceptible dots and lines. This was not Hayate's first time seeing that display format, though (even if most of the others had been in simulators), and it took her only a few moments to figure out who was doing what.

The allied fleet in this region was largely comprised of Bureau ships, its edge forming a shallow dome that bulged outwards towards the Warp-shrouded Chaos battlegroups. The dome was in poor repair, though, crumpled inward in places as thick clumps of enemy capital ships swept it with curtains of fire. The allied vessels were responding, thickening their lines around the worst-hit areas as interlocking magical barriers scabbed over their injuries, but it was clear even at this vast distance that they were losing ground.

Hayate looked closer, trying to see what had alarmed Sensors so, and found it a scant half-million kilometres from their position. The dome had completely collapsed there, Chaos heavies ripping a hole the size of a planet in the allied fleet, and golden lights gleamed in the middle of the killing field. Realspace intrusions. Big ones.

"Any idea what's coming through?" she asked.

"Looks like another of their thirty-ship groups," Sensors replied, "but it isn't the usual escort wolfpack with a capital and a few ships-of-the-line thrown in. You're looking at a sledgehammer, ma'am, nothing but super-heavy dreadnoughts packing more guns than I'd like to imagine when I'm off my meds. They push through, we lose the whole flank. Guess the figured that once their secret was out, they could stop holding back."

"Chaos dimensional transits are quite clumsy, ma'am," Rostov said. "Their void shields will be weakened until they push all the way through, and a mistimed gate collapse would shear them in half. There isn't a better time to stop them, but…"

"… but their friends are laying down too much firepower for our front-liners to do anything about it," Hayate finished for him. "How's the charge on our Arc-en-ciel?"

"Still at seventy-five per cent. Sorry, ma'am."

"Understood." She re-opened the ship comms. "Colonel Yagami to Ninth Scouting. Anyone recharged their main gun yet?"

The icon for Captain Corsa of the frigate _Kaiser's Will_ lit up. "Sure thing, ma'am. Where do you want it pointed?"

"Dreadnought battlegroup, bearing two-nine-seven high. _Red Dawn_, _Blue Harvest_, you still have MIS juice, so give them cover. The rest of us will run interference and try to give you some advance warning if something nasty comes your way. Readings say they'll be through in the next few minutes, so we'll only have one shot at this. Make it count."

The icons on her display gave a series of acknowledging blinks.

"We're suspending the resupply, ma'am?" Rostov asked.

"As quickly as we can. Have Quartermaster Krebs make the necessary arrangements, and if the repair crews can't get back to their own ships in time, we take them with us. We can always give them back once the crisis is over."

"Aye, ma'am."

The little ships of the Ninth Scouting Squadron accelerated away from the fleet supply depot, thrusters glowing. The _Kaiser's Will_ rolled into the middle of the formation, its two escorts walling it off with a dizzying array of wards and illusions. Over the Intercom, Hayate heard the crew begin their prefire sequence.

"Commencing barrel expansion…"

"Contact!" Sensors yelled. "Chaos battlecruiser, coming in fast!"

A single ship had broken from the enemy lines, weaving through the crossfire with impossible agility for something so enormous. It was still only a dot on the screen, but it was a big dot, and getting bigger with alarming speed.

"ETA?" Hayate asked.

"Four minutes. Should be too late to…"

The battlecruiser vanished.

"… oh fuck," said Sensors.

The battlecruiser reappeared two thousand metres behind the bombardment formation. The _Red Dawn_ was first to fall, its efforts to defend the _Kaiser's Will_ leaving it with nothing to spare for itself. The _Blue Harvest_, warned by the demise of its comrade, lasted two whole seconds more before it was carved into pieces. The glow around the _Will_'s projector fins faded slightly as Corsa tried to cut the power to the main gun, and then it vanished in a sphere of white light four hundred kilometres wide.

The _Eventide_ bucked madly, its wards shattering and hairline cracks popping open across its hull as the outer edge of the blast washed over it. Hayate held on to the arms of her chair with white-knuckled hands, trying to make sense of the sea of red lights that lurched before her eyes.

"Damage report!"

"Mild structural damage throughout the ship, sugar," Leeron's voice said through the comm system, "and the inertial dampeners took a beating. Repair teams are working on it, but I wouldn't recommend much high-G manoeuvring for the time being. No casualties, thank goodness."

"Dreadnought squadron is nearly through, ma'am." The sensors officer's voice was strained, right on the edge of cracking. "Not much we can do to stop them now. Recommend we get out of here ASAP."

Above them, three other Arc-en-ciel detonations blossomed in the heart of the allied fleet. _Looks like they had the same idea we did._

Hayate leaned back and closed her eyes. " Miss Nagato, please send message as follows: Ninth Scouting to Second Command. Dreadnought battlegroup mounting assault from realspace in our sector, ETA thirty seconds. All attempts at interception have failed, and our squadron is down to three ships. Requesting an exit route, over."

The little Humanoid Interface gave a brief nod, then looked down again. Hayate looked back at the tactical display, zooming in on one of the emerging dreadnoughts. It was only halfway in, most of its bulk still concealed by the golden plane of the realspace gate, but she could still see that it was massive, almost as long as her home-city of Uminari. The armoured prow was shaped like the beak of some impossibly huge bird, its dozen or so torpedo tubes sculpted to resemble nostrils. Its guns and shields were still offline thanks to Chaos's clumsy dimensional drive technology, but clouds of daemons poured from the recesses of its hull, swarming towards the allied fleet in vast, writhing streamers.

As she watched, the largest of those reached a Bureau squadron. Their point-defences lashed out, slicing through the horde of Warp-spawned monsters, but for every one they cut down, a hundred more stood ready to take their place. The megaswarm flowed over them, leaving nothing but tiny, glittering fragments of metal in their wake.

"Second Command to Ninth Scouting," an unfamiliar voice said through Yuki's mouth, "proceed to coordinates kappa-two-nine, six-seven-five. Elements from the New Republic Expeditionary Force will provide cover, along with Third Bombardment. Do not, I repeat, do _not_ engage Chaos forces. That's our job. Over."

"We have a way out," Hayate said. "Helm, set the course. Fast and quiet, please. Relay the coordinates to the _Valiant_ and the _Aurora_ as well. Did anyone get a read on how that cruiser got past us like that?"

The sensors officer shook his head. "Sorry, ma'am. Still nothing. It seems those other poor bastards we saw light up just now were hit the same way, though, and what we could make of it looked a lot like those preliminary strikes at the start of the battle. I'll keep sifting through the data."

"That tactic was… known to the Data Integration Thought Entity," Yuki said diffidently. "It exists within our databanks. Given the recent damage inflicted upon the Entity's structure, however, acquiring access to that data is proving… problematic. Another opportunity to gather information would likely accelerate the process."

"No offence, Miss Nagato," Rostov said, "but I'd prefer if we weren't the ones to do the gathering. Did you see what that thing did to us? At least they weren't smart enough to judge the size of an Arc-en-ciel blast properly. The situation's bad enough without them breathing down our necks too."

The view through the main screen disappeared, replaced by a brightly-painted wall of buttresses, gargoyles, and very, very big guns. The sensors officer squeaked and hid under his chair.

"You had to say it!" he screamed. "_You had to fucking say it_!"

The _Eventide_ dived just as the battlecruiser opened fire, dark beams glancing off its abused wards. More red lights appeared on the colonel's console, and an alarm began to blare from somewhere deep in the guts of the ship. Instinctively, she closed her hands on the MIS control crystals, but they were still cold and inert to the touch.

"Lieutenant, do we have _anything_ that can hurt them?"

""The transporters are still loaded with photon warheads, ma'am," Rostov said uncertainly, "but we're having trouble getting a lock. Whatever mutant drive system that monster's using, it's playing hell with our sensors."

"Then send everything over. Even if we don't hit anything vital, a half-dozen multi-megaton blasts inside their hull are still going to sting a bit."

"Aye, ma'am. Energising transporters in ten seconds… nine…"

The battlecruiser fired again and the _Eventide_ jinked away, its hull creaking alarmingly as one inertial compensator after another failed. _One more of those and we all die._

"… two… one… energising."

The Chaos ship vanished again. Twelve antimatter bombs exploded in the empty space where it had been a second before. _Too late. We were too late._

This time, the monstrous vessel reappeared three kilometres to the _Eventide_'s starboard, looming over it like a hunting pike next to a minnow. Hayate looked up from the mass of warning lights and empty gauges littered across her console and stared into the tiny black hole of a disintegrator barrel. _I'm sorry, Vita._

Another string of explosions bracketed the enemy battlecruiser, fading out the screen in a haze of white.

"More photon bombs!" Sensors yelled. "EM pulses from the blasts scrambled their electronics – they're blind!"

Hayate didn't hesitate. "Helm, get us out of here!"

The Chaos ship opened fire again, but not at the _Eventide_. Another Bureau frigate was swooping down at its exposed back, glowing charging rings disgorging long indigo streamers of magic into its foe's shields. An icon on Hayate's comm panel lit up.

"Hi, colonel," Captain Passat of the _Aurora_ said cheerfully. "Guess whose MIS just went online again?"

Hayate sighed. She was dimly aware that it should have been a relieved sigh.

"Good timing, captain. Will you require assistance?"

"With all due respect, ma'am, not if it's coming from you. You guys are way too banged up, and the _Valiant_ isn't looking much better. Recommend you retreat whilst we keep 'em tied up here. Don't worry; we'll be right behind you."

The blinded battlecruiser launched a spread of torpedoes, the outermost missing the _Aurora_ by scant metres. The colonel winced.

"Planned route no longer looks viable," she said, "especially if there are more of those things through our lines by now. Suggestions?"

"Well, we were supposed to head for realspace, yes?" Rostov pointed out. "Maybe we could arrive a little early. Can we make the jump?"

"I don't know." Hayate pinged Leeron. "Can we?"

"Well, sugar," the engineer drawled, "the hull's ready to shatter, the inertial compensators are fried, the engine's fluxing all over the place, and we're _thiiis_ far away from a core breach. By most conventional standards, it'd be somewhere between 'impossible' and 'suicide'. Give me two minutes. No, wait, make that one and a half."

"Understood. _Valiant_, can you make it?"

"Aye, ma'am. It won't be smooth, but it's doable."

One of the biggest problems in warfare, naval or otherwise, was communication. Most of the spacefaring civilisations allied under Operation Guardian had been waging war (or, in the Bureau's case, low-intensity police actions) amongst the stars for centuries, and had developed sophisticated techniques with which to manage military intel. The Bureau, for instance, had a streamlined but information-rich battlefield argot, reliable, high-tech vocal/telepathic communications devices, and thousands of intuitively-designed, easy-to-access channels and sub-channels for every conceivable eventuality.

Despite this, even the smallest squadron-level clash still involved hundreds of people trying to share absolutely vital information that everyone else had to know about right now, and keeping several thousand ships from four different universes networked in a chaotic (and Chaotic) melee when several of the alliance members were barely on speaking terms with each other was a Sisyphean task. The Warp-storms had shrunk the _Eventide_'s horizons, drowning out one voice after another, but Hayate had still become used to the constant, background rumble of thousands of fellow-soldiers, their clipped, staccato reports and requests for aid tapping out a rhythm like the heartbeat of a vast, disparate leviathan.

Now, though, that heartbeat was accelerating, upping in pitch and tempo as its steady pulse frayed alarmingly. The beast was panicking.

"They're through! I repeat, dreadnoughts are through!"

"… wards down to fifty per cent, almost out of ammo. Some of them are on the hull. Kaiser, where did they all _come_ from?"

"Hull breach! HULL BREACH!"

"They're clumped together, can't we get an Arc-en-ciel on them?"

"USS _Camden_ here, we've lost the _Iowa_, the _Mississippi_…"

"…en-ciel? Are you _high_? Didn't you see what they did to the last few idiots who tried that?"

"…iral Driver barriers aren't working, what are they…"

"This is the Humanoid Interface Emily Ngoma aboard the Star Destroyer _Vigilance_. Life support has failed. All crew members are deceased. Ship is drifting. Requesting instructions."

"Oh, _good_. Looks like the rest of them are coming too. Eighth Bombardment, prepare to…"

"Fire in Engineering! We can't contain it!"

"Hold the line! In Kamina's name, _hold the line_!"

– a long, low, animal wailing, abruptly cut off –

"… all that's left of Sixth Assault. MIS is out of charge, wards are barely holding together, our weapons are ineffective, and we have a hold full of photon warheads. We're going in. Wish us luck."

A realspace gate began to open in front of the Eventide, the normally perfect circle of its edge ragged and wavering. On the other side was a black void scattered with bright, tiny points of light, disturbingly clean and orderly next to the seething madness of the Warp.

The last thing Hayate saw before her ship lurched through was the _Aurora_, its hull bucking as a dozen lance beams pierced it at once.

* * *

"Status report!"

"Well, sugar, the hull's still in one piece, mostly. We had a couple of breaches, but luckily they weren't in inhabited sections. Magical Interface System's still offline, and I wouldn't recommend a jump any time soon."

"What about that battlecruiser? Did it follow us through?"

"Negative, ma'am. The etherweb sensors are lit up like it's Saints' Day, and there's ships coming and going all over the place, but there's no intrusions in our immediate area except for us and the Valiant. Not sure why, they had us dead to rights… oh. Right. _That_ would be why."

Red icons appeared across the tactical display, coalescing to form a solid wall. Chaos ships. Hundreds of Chaos ships. Hayate could see them through the monitors, a constellation of distant, unfriendly lights forming a hemisphere around the remains of Ninth Scouting.

As one, they opened fire.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** And on that heartening note, this update of the Doorstop concludes. More to come soon. Thanks for reading, and, as always, let me know what you think.


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